guaranteed to blow your mind
by Agent of the Apothecary
Summary: ANYTIME / Laura is better in a crisis than Derek, but that's kind of like saying that strangling someone is less messy than stabbing them: The comparison doesn't quite capture the desperation of all parties involved.


**Story:** guaranteed to blow your mind

**Summary:** ANYTIME / Laura is better in a crisis than Derek, but that's kind of like saying that strangling someone is less messy than stabbing them: The comparison doesn't quite capture the desperation of all parties involved.

**Notes:** I'm endlessly enthralled by Laura Hale and the mess of strengths and vulnerabilities inside of her that allowed her to keep Derek alive for six years after the fire but still failed to get her past a death-match with her uncle. Soundtrack provided by Queen because of feels-related reasons.

Also, I know canon told us in Stiles' mad researchin' binge that eight people died in the Hale house fire, but I found that out after I'd written my personal histories for the Hales and I loved all of them so much that I couldn't bear to get rid of any of them. So, um, that bit's slightly AU.

(Guys, I had _so many _Google Maps tabs open for writing this.)

* * *

_sometimes i wish i'd never been born at all _| 2005

Even though every second drags exponentially out underneath her fingernails, there isn't enough time for Laura to cover every contingency. She fudges a little on what could be categorized as _necessary_ and she picks out of the mess of her brain the first important thing that comes to mind, which is: _They can't get information out of this_. Later, Laura will be impressed by the ice that ran through her veins, shocked that she never ate or stopped to pee or checked her cell phone, and frustrated by the whole host of things she forgot to do; but for now, Laura just moves.

She cold-cocks Derek, who is still babbling Kate's name like it will erase what she's done, with her elbow and a blank apology and shoves him into the back of the car. Freezing and numb, she waits on the hood of the car until Erin and Natalie's hearts are snuffed out, the last to go in their room in the attic. Afterwards, when all she can hear is the crackle of her entire life incinerating into ash, she rests her eyes against the base of her palms and breathes through the Alpha change. Someone will smell the smoke from inside the Preserve and call 911, so the scene is about to be crawling with fire and police department personnel. Technically Laura and Derek aren't even supposed to be home—their camping trip wasn't due to end until tomorrow.

So Laura takes the part of her that wants to collapse into pieces and she sticks a pin into it and tags it for a later date. She drags a blanket over Derek in the backseat and carefully locks him in with a seatbelt so that there will be no reason for them to be pulled over, and then she drives like a bat out of fucking hell, using her hearing and her nose to detect speed traps. It's a little under three hours to Lookingglass if you obey traffic laws, but Laura makes it in one and a half.

Peter and Joanna's house is on the small and lopsided end of the Arts & Crafts movement, painted dark turquoise with yellow trim. Joanna's forsythia and Chinese witch hazel greet Laura with shocking bursts of colors against all of the plants that are still shaking off their winter sleep. The sun has just begun to rise; Derek is still unconscious. Laura can taste the Alpha in the back of her throat. _Use me_, it urges, _fight with me_, but Laura doesn't have time to let her wolf rule her head.

She doesn't want to think about her father, or being the Alpha, so she climbs out of the car and uses the fourth key on her key ring to open the back door. She almost trips on one of Miles' toys in the kitchen, a little Fischer Price truck thing made of big plastic pieces. It squeaks as she steps on it, scattering blocks across the linoleum. Laura swallows down the thickness in her throat and goes to Peter's study, where his journals line the shelves above his desk. Laura still has to make it to Coos Bay and then Tule Lake before she and Derek can go back to Beacon Hills; there's no time for sorting. She packs all of Peter's journals into boxes, and then the four volumes that Joanna had borrowed from the family's library on their last visit to Beacon Hills.

Laura tries not to think about how little she knows about being Alpha, but there's so much that she's not thinking about that it all sort of runs together and begins to bleed across her consciousness. Her chest starts to feel tight as she puts the box of books into the trunk of her car and checks on Derek. He's moved out of unconsciousness into sleep. The slightly traumatized look of his face has tightened; his mouth is a long, thin, angry line.

It begins to rain halfway to Coos Bay. The road is framed by nothing but trees, and the green blurs and stretches the harder it rains. Laura has supernatural reflexes but her mom's Subaru sure as hell doesn't, so she loses the thirty minutes she could've gained by driving like a madman and pulls into the driveway that deposits half a mile up into the house that Karl, Jorge, and Edith share at a time closer to midday than she'd really like. Laura is just old enough to have picked up the odd strains in their relationship, but they're pack—and more than _pack_ they're _family_—so she doesn't care that their marriage has one more person than humans would probably be comfortable with.

Their door is unlocked because Edith's head is stuffed full of cotton fluff when it comes to practical things like _locking the fucking doors_. Laura lingers outside, under the cover of the porch, smelling for hunters or drifters or omegas, but the house reeks of family and love, things that sharpen and stab at Laura's chest. There aren't any toys scattered in the entryway, although there are boxes from UPS that look big enough to hold the crib for the coming baby.

They have the beginnings of a library in the den behind the kitchen. Half of it is stocked with Jorge's poor taste in romance and science fiction and then whole shelves' worth of the kind of poetry they make you read in Intro to Poetic Thought—Yeats and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Shelley and the entire collected works of Tennyson—that scent heavily of Karl, who is the only member of their family who could place in competitive brooding ahead of Derek. Against the back wall are the books on lore and theory. They're copies of the books at the house in Beacon Hills, or newer editions, or musty old books in languages that only Edith knows how to read.

Laura takes them all, even the ones in Sanskrit; and because she's running on fumes and sheer willpower and Jorge makes sure that their house actually recycles cardboard boxes instead of stuffing them into the back of the pantry like Joanna does, she has to unpack the baby's crib and what looks like a stroller that passed through the Federal Patent Office on its way to Oregon in order to pack up the books against the rain.

Derek is waking up again when Laura slams the trunk shut. "Laur?" he says groggily from the backseat, lifting his head and frowning. Laura would feel bad about the next part, except he's her only family now and she can smell the indecision and dawning horror growing inside him as he comes back to himself. She hits him again, this time with a solid pulse of Alpha strength, and out he goes. Hopefully he won't remember much of this. Laura giddily realizes that she's wishing permanent brain damage on her baby brother, but it seems in line with the rest of her day.

It's midmorning now, grey with rain, and the drive to Tule Lake is a little over five hours. Provided that there aren't any surprises, like hunters with buckshot and monkshood, waiting for them at the house on Tule Lake, they should be back in Beacon Hills by a little after sunset. Laura turns on 88.5 FM and listens to NPR as she drives—recklessly, considering the state of the slick roads—across Oregon. She gets tired of the news and bantering pundits and eventually turns to the public radio classical station, just in time to catch the overture of the Saturday matinee at the Seattle Opera.

It's _Samson et Dalila_.

The parallels are hard to ignore, even if Laura doesn't know a word of French beyond the chorus of "Lady Marmalade." Laura doesn't know everything that happened with Kate Argent, but Derek being rather obviously in love with someone had been hard to ignore, even with Laura at Humboldt State for most of the week. Making him listen to this opera—and Derek _does_ speak French, because he's the biggest girl in a family of girls—would be needlessly cruel; she uses it as validation for keeping him unconscious.

What with the rain and the cold, they have the road mostly to themselves, so Laura stops pretending to have human reflexes by the time she turns onto OR-39 and the radio begins to go in and out, static messing with the pure, lilting cruelty of Dalila's voice in the Philistine temple. Laura finally gives up and turns it off when she can see the glittering stretch of the lake in front of her. Imogene's house is the last on the left before the turn towards the lake; the California Bay Laurel that Imogene had planted when Laura was born is huge now, at least six meters tall, and it sweeps over the pale blue clapboard structure like loving arms.

It takes Laura twenty minutes to pull herself together, swallowing compulsively with her forehead against the steering wheel. She cracks one of the windows and acclimatizes to the scent, the warm stickiness of the lake and the sweetness of the laurel. The tree blooms in the late winter, and Laura can taste it, like she can taste the sandalwood and cedar of Imogene's perfume and the still-unfamiliar cologne that Michael has recently adopted. If Laura tried, she could pull Greta and Steven and Isolde out; she could roll them over her tongue and taste their arguments and their happiness and their _lack_—but Laura doesn't try because Laura doesn't have time for this right now.

She doesn't even test her willpower by trying the front door; she goes in through the basement, unearths Imogene's journals from where they are stored in a carved cedar chest under a box of wolfsbane bullets, and carries the chest back to her car. She thinks very briefly about going in and trying to find anything that Isolde and Steven might have, but they're only a little bit older than Laura and Laura sure as hell isn't keeping journals at this point in her life.

With that rationale sorted, Laura turns over the engine and guns it, with the lake to her back and Imogene's beautiful house in her rearview mirror. She makes it twelve miles before she has to pull over, breathing heavily through her nose, her eyes bleeding red and brown indiscriminately, her claws digging into the padded plastic of the steering wheel. This is going extremely _not well_.

_Kill_, her wolf prods. _You want it. Take life from her. Take everything_.

Laura knows better than to listen to her wolf in situations like this, but if she doesn't do something she's going to end up transforming in her mom's Subaru along the side of US-97 and that's going to be unpleasant for everyone involved, including the Subaru.

In the end, she drives back to Imogene's house, goes in through the front door, and takes every framed photograph from the mantel above the fireplace in the living room. Two of them are of Imogene with her children gathered around her, Greta and Michael younger and grinning toothily, Steven and Isolde older and attempting to look surly. Three are of a collection of the cousins: Laura holding Miles and blowing a raspberry into his belly; Isolde carrying Derek on her shoulders as she runs across the lawn towards the house in Beacon Hills; Natalie and Erin in matching ugly early-80s bathing suits emerging from Tule Lake, back when they still played the twin card as though their scents didn't make them easily distinguishable. One is of Imogene, holding Laura on her first birthday—the day that Imogene was made Laura's godmother and the guardian of her wolf.

To keep the glass in the frames from breaking, Laura wraps them in a tablecloth from the linen drawer in the kitchen and then she puts them in the cedar chest with Imogene's journals and she finally, _finally_ escapes the house, the ghost of Imogene's arms around her, the smell of pack and family. She escapes them all the way down US-97 into Beacon Hills, where the fire climbs into her nose and clings, banishing everything except the sooty remains of her family's corpses.

* * *

The sheriff's department finds the final body count to be 14; the survivors are listed as three, although calling Peter a survivor is very generous—Laura heard his heart die. A wolf's heart never stops. Laura is fairly certain he is never going to wake up.

She gets a list of their names, as though she's ever going to forget them, along with a portfolio thick with assets and insurance claims. Edith's baby isn't on the list, so Laura adds _Matilda _to the end before she tears it up into little pieces and leaves it for one of the hotel maids to clean up.

* * *

When Derek wakes up, he doesn't remember anything about the driving or the houses or Laura punching him, so she decides not to mention any of it. He looks broken by everything, including the simple fact of his own existence.

* * *

Laura keeps Peter's book of contacts but leaves everything else packed. The boxes go into long-term storage in Eureka, on a table specifically bought so that the damp won't get to them from the ground. Possessions could theoretically be salvaged from the other houses, but by the time Laura officially drives up with a lawyer to take a look at them, they've been rifled through by hunters and everything reeks of Kate Argent and her psycho buddies. The scent trail always begins and ends abruptly at the base of the driveway; Laura couldn't track Kate even if she folded to the pressure exerted by her wolf to _ruin_.

She doesn't even make it into Imogene's house; she sits on the front steps, breathing shallowly and trying to focus on the laurel blossoms, as the lawyer walks around inside and yells out things about estate sales and recouping property and other stuff that Laura, a twenty-year-old botany major, knows nothing about. He's a partner from Jorge's firm and his smile is faintly acrid along the edges, like he wants to shout at the universe for putting Laura and Derek into this position. She appreciates the sentiment, in a detached, nonverbal sort of way.

Laura tells him to sell everything.

* * *

Laura can't really think in Beacon Hills; every time she pulls a yellow legal pad towards her and flips to a blank page, all she can manage to do is write _TO DO_ across the top before she can feel the beginnings of a panic attack setting in. The obvious human answer to her problems is to just leave; Derek won't be going back to school any time soon, she's sure as hell not ready to finish out the semester, and they've got more money than any pair of people should receive in their lifetime and the freedom that comes with all that cash.

But leaving comes with its own set of issues. Laura has to find somewhere without a pack or with one that won't mind a little pack settling in along the fringe of their territory. That means a big city, one where packs have their land assigned by street blocks instead of by miles. She's never lived away from the forest, from the hundreds of square miles of nature preserves and national forests that the Hale pack called home; neither has Derek. Laura wasn't raised to be an Alpha and she's never truly been _alone_ before, so God help her but she's completely fucked.

She might as well be fucked somewhere that doesn't drain energy out of her like a vampire. There's a map in the back of Peter's journal, drawn in Joanna's small drafting hand, that shows the territorial boundaries of North America. Canada is claimed in splotches that would make it easy for Derek and Laura to slip in unnoticed, but Laura's desire to live in Canada about equals her desire to paint her naked body with human blood and dance in front of Beacon Hills Town Hall. New York is an obvious destination; millions of humans, four major packs, and as far away from Beacon Hills as she and Derek can get without actually flinging themselves in the Atlantic Ocean and swimming for Ireland.

Laura has an instinctual desire to avoid the obvious, bred into her by generations of powerful, paranoid werewolves; she ends up picking Pittsburgh on a cold night in the middle of March, three days before their first full moon with Laura as the Alpha. She picks a neighborhood without a pack, sends emails to the two Alphas listed in Peter's _Packs That Don't Actively Hate Us_ list as a friendly heads-up, and pays the lawyer to find them an apartment.

The motions—transferring her credits to the University of Pittsburgh, enrolling Derek in high school, replenishing the scent markers along their land so that a migrant pack doesn't get stupid ideas about open territory—keep Laura's head above water. She sells the cars that Kate Argent had so helpfully left, with their tires slashed, unburned. She drives with a silent Derek in the passenger's seat to HSU, where she empties her dorm room of all of her belongings and hugs her roommate, pretty much the only person on campus who can stand her, good-bye. She talks to the lawyer again, seriously considers fucking him, and then makes the adult decision not to exploit his stinking sympathy for her untenable situation. She sells her mom's Subaru and replaces it with a burgundy two-door Toyota that makes Derek replace his perpetually angst-filled man-pain expression with a fabulous bitchface.

It's not a prologue to anything. There is no doing over, no beginning again, no fresh start. Almost the entirety of Laura's family is dead, and she is carrying her father's memories inside her head, where she's trying to paint over them like she'd tried to paint over the hideous mermaid wallpaper in her bedroom when she turned thirteen.

Pittsburgh is an attempt to jolt herself into living, but there will be no efforts at salvation.

* * *

Their first full moon doesn't turn into a disaster only by the skin of Laura's teeth. The pull of the Alpha form is too strong to control and, recognizing that, Laura locks herself and Derek into the catacombs underneath the house and lets it take over. The sensation of the change is entirely different from when she was a Beta; Laura's wolf ceases to act as a personality supplementary to her human one and simply _becomes_ everything.

Across the room, Derek falls into submission with a faint, bruised smell of eagerness. He wants accepting Laura as Alpha to do something for them. Laura knows better, but she pads over to where Derek is lying with his back to the cold concrete of the floor and nudges him with her nose, letting her breath ease across the thin, exposed skin of his neck. He smells like home, and home will always smell like smoke, now, where once it tasted like her father's cookies and her mother's perfume.

After the submission, things get spectacularly worse. Laura hadn't realized that Derek had brought Kate into the catacombs, but once she isn't devoting 90% of her senses towards bringing Derek into her power, she can scent Kate everywhere, dank and moldy, like old skin. Kate smells like the mummy narrator looks on _Tales from the Crypt_; as Laura gags, she honestly can't imagine getting any enjoyment out of fucking her.

Derek whines and presses backwards, slithering off of the floor and protecting himself by edging into a corner. Her baby brother is scared of a human; Laura can almost feel it, like a wave of depressed sweat rolling off of him. One day, Laura hopes, anger will replace the fear. Right now, she feels enough anger for both of them.

_KILL_, Laura's wolf opines. _KILL HER._

Laura still doesn't know exactly what happened the night of the fire, but it's only her human, rational side that cares about that. Her wolf would much rather rip out Kate's throat and bathe in her blood before asking questions about what or why or how. On the full moon, Laura's human gets barely a mention in the credits—her wolf is running the show.

The walls were specifically designed to keep werewolves in check, even Alphas with more anger issues than Sigmund Freud could shake a cigar at, so Laura spends her first full moon as Alpha throwing herself bodily against a reinforced steel door, her claws raking holes in the surrounding stone. She won't be able to follow Kate's scent trail outside of the catacombs—if she had, she would've done it already—but her wolf doesn't think that it will be a problem. Her wolf doesn't trust her human instincts. Her wolf mostly just wants to go Patrick Bateman on Kate Argent's ass.

Derek watches her all night, eyes blue and blinking and luminescent, his scent hovering somewhere between confusion and terror. He wants to do something to help her, but he doesn't know what. Laura can sense things like that now; she can hear Derek's emotions as if he's whispering them to himself in his little protected corner, a mantra of _Laura Kate why scared sex blood_, thundering against the inside of her skull.

Laura breaks four bones and dislocates her left shoulder. She has to wait until she's human the next morning to pop it back in, and the pain almost knocks her out. As she's inspecting her ribs for signs of incomplete or wrong healing, she realizes that she can see them through her skin. Laura has always been the most voluptuous Hale sister, so she gets a bit of a shock when she realizes that her hip bones have made a valley directing between her legs, her skin ashen and pulled tight over bones that Laura has never seen before.

"You smell sick," Derek tells her flatly as he watches her prod at the ball socket where her leg meets her hip. "You aren't eating."

"Yes I am," says Laura automatically, although she doesn't know if that's actually true.

Derek shrugs and leans back against the metal door, resting his head against the latch that will need human, dexterous fingers to open it. He means, _Whatever my Alpha says I know to be true_, but it comes across as, _Whatever you want to fucking tell yourself_, which is like twelve degrees less encouraging. He's lost weight, too, and it's hollowed out cheeks that were always pinchable and adorable.

With a thin ripple of shock, Laura realizes that he's become attractive and maybe even manly since the last time she looked at him through the critical lens of _my pathetically emotionally stunted little brother_. Ants crawl up her spine at the thought of Kate Argent taking advantage of that adolescent awkwardness. Her wolf bitchily points out that killing Kate had totally been an option that Laura's human had vetoed previously.

Laura decides right then to get the hell out of Dodge, and they're gone by midmorning, their car packed with the clothes that Laura had brought back from her dorm room at HSU and yanked without really looking from a rack of Derek's size at Kohl's. She leaves the radio tuned to classical until Derek looks like he wants to rip off his ears and stuff them down her throat, at which point she takes pity on him and changes to blues.

It's too early for the stuff they really want to hear: David Bowie's high whine and Freddie Mercury's melodies and Jim Morrison being Jim Morrison; if Laura plays that, they're just going to stare out of the windows and think about their dead family, which is about as far from productive or emotionally healthy as you can get without actually becoming a serial killer. Seeing as how Laura is staring out of the windshield, her white knuckles squeezing the plastic of the steering wheel until it becomes malformed, she's probably already thinking about them too much and not concentrating hard enough on the road.

Midway through Nevada, Derek leans over and turns off the radio. He has his _I would prefer to brood without all of this goddamn crooning_ look in his face.

"Fucking deal," Laura tells him. She turns the radio back on, cranks it three increments louder, and adds, "Driver picks the tunes."

Derek's face tells her that he wants her to shove an icepick in her heart and fall over dead.

"Tough fucking luck," Laura says. Peter likes the blues, and as he's not dead it's the only safe place that Laura can think to rest. The silence isn't right for this; the silence scares Laura and reminds her of the way that Kate's scent had turned Derek's wolf into a terrified little mouse. She opens her mouth and sings them across Nevada, I-80 black and grey under the new tires of her used burgundy Toyota, until her throat is scratchy and dry and Derek is physically clawing at the door.

"Stop, _stop_," he hisses at a rest stop outside Salt Lake City. "I get it, now please shut the _fuck_ up." He slams the door behind him and stomps off to glare at himself in the shitty bathroom mirror as Laura fills up the tank and then goes inside to critically survey the gas station's snack collection. She feels like she should eat, as if Imogene is hovering over her shoulder and pointing out that just because Erin and Natalie are tiny little sticks doesn't mean Laura needs to develop an eating disorder to make a point, but she also gets nauseous just looking at the different flavors of Combos and Doritos and Lays.

She ends up buying the cheesy Chex Mix because everyone in the Hale family has always hated Chex Mix + cheese powder, and then she gets herself a flavor of local soda that sounds unfamiliar and disgusting. Derek will eat anything because he's sixteen and got hollow legs, so she buys him five packages of beef jerky and then a big bottle of water. Derek still hasn't come back from the bathroom when she tumbles their purchases out of her arms and into his seat, hoping that the condensation from the water bottle will annoy him.

No one else is waiting for gas and the attendant's heart sounds bored as hell, steady and lethargic as a metronome; Laura sits on the hood of the car and opens the bag of Chex Mix. She picks out one of the cracker pieces and looks at it for a long time. It smells as unappetizing as her ex-boyfriend's feet, which is fairly astounding for a snack food (also, impressive), and it takes a massive amount of willpower and desire not to faint on their road trip and wrap the Toyota around a tree for her to put it on her tongue.

It takes like sandpaper and wet cat and the box that Kraft macaroni & cheese is packaged in. Laura's stomach makes an unhappy, squelching noise, although that could be because she's introducing it to a concept—_sustenance_—that it hasn't seen in a long time. She tries a pretzel next in the vague hope that nothing will be as disgusting as the cracker, and she's right. The pretzel is better; the pieces of Chex cereal go down the easiest.

Laura spends the next six minutes picking out the crackers and dropping them onto the cement to her left. The attendant doesn't even bother complaining when the birds begin to hop closer, interested in the potential for a free meal, and Laura is so distracted by the way that the birds sound—different from the ones at home, throatier and piercing—that it takes her longer than it should to pick out that the attendant's heartbeats are _too_ even, and inside of the store the cashier has fallen into that same rhythm.

Derek is still gone. Laura checks her watch, remembers that it was lost in the fire, and digs her cell phone out of her pocket. Twenty-two minutes is a long time, even for a champion brooder like Derek, and Laura's human begins to panic slightly as her wolf turns the volume down on the noxious cheese smell and dials up the surrounding area. She can hear Derek's heart, the shuffle of his feet as he moves across the tiled floor of the bathroom, but they're muffled and slow. Controlling her Alpha senses is still hit-or-miss, but if she closes her eyes and imagines zooming in on the room, blocking out everything immediately surrounding herself, she can hear a steady _drip, drip, drip_; too thick for water.

"Oh, _Jesus_," she mutters, her teeth already growing, her claws pushing out of her fingertips. She stays the transformation at a half-change and leaps off of the car, across the lot, to where two hunters wearing protective charms are holding longbows and blocking the doorway to the men's restroom. "Get. Out," Laura growls at them, extending her arms to the side. Thank the Lord her body remembers all of her dad's lessons about making your body appear bigger and more threatening than it actually is; her mind is too occupied.

The first hunter, smaller, blanches. Laura can see the sweat bead against his temples, but there is a curious disconnect where she can't smell it. "Y-you can't touch us," he blusters, pushing his chest out so Laura can see the amulet more clearly. That was a stupid move, because Laura can see immediately that it only protects against the wolf's body; she picks up a wooden crate from the pile next to the Dumpster and breaks it against the wall.

"Want to bet?" she asks, and she advances on both of the hunters with big wooden shards in either hand. Never before has she felt like a bigger fraud, with the red of her irises reflecting in their glassy stares, holding the remains of a packing crate that still smells of tangerines and pesticides.

The taller, microscopically less stupid hunter grips his friend by the upper arm and says, "She _knows_," and then he turns and fucking bolts for a pick-up parked across the street. It looks tangentially familiar—after a few seconds, Laura places it as the one she'd seen outside of the gas station in Wendover where she'd parked to pee and buy herself a Coke. His friend stumbles after him a second later, and Laura forgets about them as she runs for the door—and she can't get in, because the bottom of the frame is lined with a thick dusting of mountain ash.

"Un_fucking_believeable," she tells Derek, who is hunched over the sink with a bitchy expression on his face as he considers the arrow sprouting out of his chest. "Barbed?" she asks, examining the structural integrity of the doorframe.

"No fucking shit," Derek replies. "Not wolfsbane, at least."

"They were clearly amateurs," Laura says dismissively. She raps against a likely looking spot with her knuckles and hears nothing except the dull reverberation of insulation. "Can you get it out?"

Derek's hand hovers over the arrow. "Wrong angle," he says. "Are you just going to stand there or you going to pay zoo admission?"

"Witty," Laura replies, "so witty that I might just leave you here."

Derek wheezes in laughter in response; he has to lean his hip against the sink to do so without falling to the floor. The mountain ash doesn't completely dull Laura's senses, but it still feels like she's looking at and smelling him through a thick wad of cotton padding. Her wolf becomes furious at the thought of being separated from her pack; Laura yanks back her hand and pushes it as fast as she can into the doorframe, tearing with her claws until she reaches a part that she can pull back. About two feet of wall collapses, raining plaster and pink bits of insulation over Laura, and she tugs on the edges until the hole is big enough for Derek to climb through. The steady heartbeat of the attendant ticks on in the background, and Laura wonders how in the hell no one has come by to see this yet.

She gets her answer after she's held Derek against the side of the Dumpster and pushed the barbed arrow through to the other side of his chest. There's an OUT OF ORDER banner hanging over the sign to the rest stop near the ramp back to I-80. It's clever in the short term, stupid in the long term, and Laura parks to pull it down when she realizes that she's left Derek's blood all over the bathroom and they'll probably get stupid questions about it.

The attendant is still asleep, so Laura orders Derek to eat at least two of the packages of beef jerky as she jogs back to the rest stop, unearths a bottle of bleach from a janitor's closet that is now missing half of a door, and pours it over everything that smells like a blood stain. She can't do anything about the security cameras, but at least there's not DNA evidence waiting for an enterprising CSI with shit to prove; besides, she's hoping the hunters were smart enough to do something about video evidence before they shot barbed arrows at a sixteen-year-old washing his hands in a public restroom.

"You stink," Derek informs her when she climbs back into the car. He sneezes twice, and blood bubbles on the front of his shirt.

"Your fault," Laura says. "I'm not the one with the _NCIS_ obsession, babe."

"Don't call me babe," Derek growls, but his mouth is full of beef jerky and he loses all of his intimidation points because he's so goddamn adorable, trying to regenerate flesh for the big hole in his chest.

* * *

Laura doesn't panic until they stop for the night just past Evanston. She gets them a motel room just for the entertainment value of watching Derek suspiciously sniff the bed sheets, and then she shotguns the bathroom, tells Derek to order Chinese from the menu helpfully left on top of the television, and goes to pieces in the shower.

A big part of why Laura is shit at making human friends is that she doesn't understand the importance of concepts like privacy and personal independence; wolves don't _do_ either of those things, so Laura is used to feeling the adults in her life panic and swear and stink of confusion. Laura has never wanted to _do her own thing_ or _discover herself_ or _learn it on her own_. A pack is about togetherness, about the whole being more than the sum of the pieces, and Laura is better at being a piece than she is at faking the whole.

It isn't in Laura to be ashamed that Derek can hear her cry. She does it in the shower because she can get snot everywhere and not have to worry about how abused her nose will be by the shitty one-ply toilet paper; also, she knows that Derek will be awkward if forced to watch her dissolve into tears, and Derek has already reached his awkwardness quota of the day, when the clerk at reception had seriously asked Derek if he was with Laura of his own free will or if the clerk should call the police—he'd seen the bloodstains on Derek's shirt.

She crawls out when she smells the delivery guy pull into the parking lot. MSG has a very distinctive smell and Laura's stomach, renewed by half of a bag of Chex Mix, grumbles long and hard about not currently being stuffed with sesame chicken. Laura piles half of the chicken on top of an order of pork chow mein and huddles over it with a pair of chopsticks while Derek steadily inhales everything else in the bag, his butt pressed against her hip. She doesn't want to turn on the television and she doesn't want to talk about today, but the silence slides down her throat and upsets the food therein.

"We should probably establish some ground rules," she says to the back of Derek's neck, sucking down a noodle.

"What, like a bat signal?" Derek says. He must be awfully tired, if he's just opening himself up to the dork jokes like that.

"Cute," Laura says. "It'd be cuter if I didn't know you were deadly serious."

"You should never joke about Batman," he says seriously, and Laura can't help cracking a grin at that. She feels emptied out, after the tears, and still not at all ready to keep her brother from dying on their cross-country road trip.

"Let's shelve that one for now, Bruce," she suggests drily. "I meant more, like, when they shot you, you could've said something along the lines of, 'Laura, sister dear, I appear to have been shot by a pair of morons with more flannel than balls.'" After critically examining something that might've once been a sugar snap pea, Laura abandons it in favor of more sesame chicken.

Derek shrugs. He doesn't say anything, which is not exactly rare when it comes to graduates of the Derek Hale School of Communication, but Laura has sixteen years of being his sister and the Alpha senses on her side. "Derek," she says. "Look at me."

He reluctantly shuffles to the side, scooting his butt further up the bed. His current position qualifies as 'looking at Laura' by the skin of its teeth, but Laura knows how to pick her battles. "Don't ever do that again," she tells him. She lets the Alpha bleed into her voice and her eyes; she can feel her face shift, but it's the smoothest transition she's ever had. The wolf assures her that this is right; this is good. Derek smells like a vessel full of liquid—all blood and tears and saline solutions—and hers to control. It tickles her nose.

"I don't know what you mean," Derek says, but he's not even trying; his voice is flat and hard like a paving stone. There's no inflection on any of the words.

Laura has so much sympathy for her father right now. Beyond simply how fucking difficult it is to suppress Alpha instincts, he'd also raised four children within a pack structure, and Laura knows that Natalie and Erin were worth more trouble than most sextuplets during their formative years. "Derek," she chides, gathering the growl deep in her chest, "you aren't _ever_ going to do something so goddamn fundamentally stupid again."

She knows how the next sentence goes—it's not your fault, they would've wanted us to live, don't you fucking dare leave me here by myself—but she can't force her mouth into the proper shape for the words. Derek knows all of them, but he did it anyway; he stood in a bathroom at a shitty rest stop outside of fucking _Salt Lake City_ and took a barbed arrow to the chest.

_We could kill her_, Laura's wolf points out, and hysteria bubbles helplessly, pushing at her diaphragm. Laura's wolf is insane and also insanely unhelpful.

"I'm your Alpha," she tells him crisply, "and we are the only ones left. I don't care what she did to you, but she's a murdering psychopath and she's gone and one day, we're going to rip out her intestines and eat them, but that day is not today. You have to live to see that day. _You have to live, Derek_."

Derek has a thick, square jaw that looks like it could cut glass, and it tenses when she mentions eating Kate Argent's body. He wants to; she can smell the spike of interest and he's too young to keep the bloodlust from turning his eyes a sharp, uncompromising blue.

"Okay?" Laura says, and she kicks her forgotten carton of Chinese off of the bed and drags Derek down into a hug; the tight, octopus kind, with her palms pressed flat against his shoulders. She draws his head in so he can smell her neck, smell pack and family and other tricks. The particulars—Imogene, grassy and deep; Miles, powdery and basic like baking soda; Edith, citrus and ink—are lost for forever, but she will always smell like the pack, until the day she dies.

* * *

_i just can't get no relief_ | 2007

Laura works Thursday to Sunday, five to midnight, at Hemingway's Bar on campus. Karaoke Night is Wednesday, so Laura saves herself from that trauma, and even though there's a rotating door of freshmen with shitty fake IDs who don't tip well or even, like, at all, there are enough hardened regulars who come in before 10pm that she pulls out ahead. Technically she doesn't need to work, but technically she doesn't need to _sleep_, either, and that's hardly stopping her.

She's got a half hour for dinner at six-thirty that she spends hunched over journal articles with a highlighter in one hand and a Reuben from Primanti Bros. in the other. That's how she meets Chris—mouth full of sauerkraut, forehead scrunched, as she rereads a sentence about the development of heterosis in Iberian populations of sea lavender. She highlights a sentence about a speciation event that she thinks the authors whipped out of their collective asses and writes a demeaning series of question marks next to it; when she looks up, checking the clock above the bar, there's a man staring at her rather obviously, cradling a glass of whiskey.

Laura lets her eyes linger on the line of his shoulders, the kind of broad that screams _yes, the sex would be _that_ good_ under worn canvas, and then to the V of chest revealed by a Henley that's so unbuttoned it's probably a public decency violation. He tips his glass in her direction and drains it, eyes never leaving hers.

If Laura were a little more stupid, she probably would've missed the big neon sign hanging over his head blinking _HUNTER_ in flashing green light. But it's all there, in the metal and oil scent of his hands and the way that blood is speckled in microscopic dots up the right leg of his jeans. He's still fantastically hot and the blond stubble is doing things to Laura's insides that she hasn't felt since before the fire, but he's also dangerous.

When she packs up her homework and returns to the bar, pulling her hair up into a high ponytail, his eyes are glued to the small of her back, the skin exposed as her t-shirt rides up. She can feel those piercing eyes tickling her skin, and okay, Laura, in deference to Derek's delicate feelings re: traumatizing sexual experiences hasn't fucked anyone in so long that she's basically forgotten what to do with a cock if she found herself alone in a room with one.

Still—he's a hunter. Even worse, when she moves down the bar to ask him if he wants a refill, his wedding ring clinks against the glass when he shoves it towards her. Laura doesn't judge open marriages, but she generally doesn't get involved unless she's heard about it from both parties; it's easy to lie about being poly when you've got four beers on an empty stomach and your tongue down someone's throat.

"Refill?" Laura asks, trying to keep her voice from freezing. He looks like he'll tip well.

The hunter's smile is more of a smirk and it barely touches his eyes. "Yes," he says, his voice low but still audible above the hum of human activity surrounding them. "Please," he tacks on a second later, polite murderous gentleman that he is.

Laura unearths the bottle of top-shelf whiskey from where the staff hides it under the bar and concentrates on pouring it in a long, amber curve of light. He smells dazzlingly appealing, even with the bloodstains and the acrid bite of wolfsbane—Laura's getting a little bit of Edward Cullen going on, because she wants to lean across the bar and take a big bite out of his neck. She means that in the most sexualized way possible.

Her self-control is so not up for playing mind games; if he's good enough at hunting to still be alive at what is a very well-preserved late thirties or early forties, he's probably got the beginning moves of a werewolf-hunter innuendo chess match mapped out already, and Laura's got three more articles on hybrid zones to read before her seminar tomorrow. "Here you go," she says curtly, forgoing a tip in favor of getting the hell away from him and his weirdly compelling eyes.

"Thanks," he says. It's slow, savoring the word, and Laura doesn't even try to parse out his meaning from his scent. She turns on her heel, stuffs the bottle of whiskey under the bar, and goes to harass a pair of obvious frat pledges into ordering something ill-advised and fruity.

Four hours and fifty-seven minutes later, as Laura finishes mixing her last strawberry martini of the weekend, he's lurking at a table near the exit. In no way is Hemingway's suited to a quiet night of alcohol-induced navel-gazing, so Laura isn't buying for a second the aura that he's emitting of a man trying to drown his marital sorrows in some nice Irish.

Derek has been taking up aggressive loafing like he wants to qualify for the national championships; Laura needs to get home, make sure he's finished his homework, bitch at him until he agrees to wash the sheets on his bed, and annotate the rest of her seminar articles. She delivers the strawberry martini to a haggard graduate student with a sympathetic smile, collects her tips, and tags Meredith in.

The hunter is pretending to be subtly staring into the distance, contemplating the moroseness of his own existence, when Laura slides into the chair across from his. "Your fake brood isn't even regionally competitive," she tells him. "Five out of ten, tops."

"And here I was, thinking the shadows of this corner would lead to me at least a seven for atmosphere," he says drily, leaning back and crossing his legs at the ankle. She feels the toe of his leather boot nudge against her calf, and she refuses to move on principle. He drops the act; those eyes are too piercing to ever convincingly play at drunk, but the rest of his body language shifts to join them.

"What do you want?" she asks flatly. "You've got 'Code-abiding' written all over you, and I haven't broken any of its strictures."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says slowly, lifting his drink and letting it linger near his mouth. He's picked up that she wants to fuck him; _great_.

Laura manages not to sigh and massage her temples only by virtue of years of experience dealing with Derek, the surliest of awkward, surly teenagers. "Can we please cut it with the mind games? I've got a class at to TA at ten tomorrow and professors generally disapprove of authority figures falling asleep into their notes. What do you _want_, hunter?"

The knowledge that she's in public keeps her from doing the stupid thing and letting the Alpha leak into her voice or eyes. Her wolf thinks that ripping his throat out would be a fantastic substitute for sweaty, athletic sex, but her wolf never has good suggestions. As her human is still sort of hoping that sex might be on the table, clearly no one can be trusted.

"An interesting choice of places to settle," the hunter says pointedly, rolling his glass between his palms. "Space to grow a pack."

The way he says it tells her that he knows she's an Alpha. She's not entirely sure _how_, since she doesn't exactly walk around with a sign around her neck explaining her position in her pack's hierarchy, but he knows and that pisses her off more than it probably should. All of Laura's emotions fall by hair-trigger now; she's lost the presence of her family at her back to keep her centered. Derek couldn't center a goddamn yoga instructor.

"My pack," says Laura carefully, so she doesn't lose control like a barely pubescent pup, "is none of your business, hunter."

"Wolves are always my business," says the hunter pleasantly. Now that he's not trying to get her attention, his eyes don't dip below her chin. Laura catches herself being disappointed about that—her rack looks pretty spectacular in this shirt—and then hates herself because (a) he's _married_ and (b) he crawled out of his mommy's belly with a shotgun in one hand and a bag of mountain ash in the other.

Laura rolls her eyes and informs him in her bitchiest voice possible, "We're not _wolves_." She means that they aren't animals; the hunter's mouth tightens in the corners.

"Whatever you like to call yourselves," he replies, "is not my concern. The safety of the humans around you, however, is a different matter."

The oddest things trigger Laura. Back, before the fire, she'd had a women's studies course at HSU and one of their discussions had ended up in a full-thrown yelling match about trigger warnings between a dickish film studies major with pretensions towards making _art_ and the president of their campus' women's organization. Laura had spent the class period outlining her final paper for Psych 152. Before the fire, Laura didn't really have anything traumatic that _could_ be triggered; her life was like a happy family montage in a shitty blockbuster, with gardening and washing her mom's car with the garden hose and learning to make pie crust.

Everyone in Laura's memories is always laughing and filtered through golden light and it's like a greatest hits album of summer. That's all bullshit, of course—even before the fire there were fights and angry silences and the occasional Omega that had to be scared off of pack territory or destroyed—but that's the only way that Laura can remember her family, now: Imogene, shirt splashed with tomato seeds, teaching Laura her lasagna recipe.

So, things that trigger Laura now include tomato seeds, and garden hoses, and grilled pork. And, apparently, the hunter's bitchy comeback about human safety.

Laura stands so quickly that she almost knocks the table backwards into the hunter's lap, just a hair under supernaturally, obviously fast. "If you want to protect humans," Laura tells him in a ragged voice, "you should look in-house, _hunter_."

* * *

Laura had been taught about the special difference between herself and other members of the pack very early. The goal was for the children to be gentle with everyone, but that wasn't realistic with preternaturally strong children playing tag and Twister and wrestling on the front lawn. So, Laura was told to be careful with her mother and Joanna and Miles and Jorge and Michael and Isolde; if she scratched them, even with her flimsy human nails, they would heal slowly and bleed a lot.

But it had not occurred to Laura, until the discomfiting hunter with a superiority complex and seriously sexy stubble brought it to her attention, that the hunters who had murdered her family under the justification of protecting the human population were, in fact, burning six humans alive.

The irony scalds her insides; Laura drinks three bottles of Leffe to relax the stiff muscles between her shoulders and goes to bed with her stomach hot and swollen in her throat, pressing her forehead between Derek's shoulders. He can probably smell her tears but he pretends that he can't; he is soft in so many places that Laura can't tell where it's safe for her to rest her claws.

* * *

Monday sucks.

* * *

By the time it's four-thirty on Thursday and Laura is tugging on one of her work shirts and scanning her email at her desk in the lab, she's mostly recovered from the shitstorm that had been Sunday night and her own black mood snap that had resulted in Monday degenerating into her verbally flaying her freshmen in her Foundations Bio recitation.

She's absently twisting her hair up into a particularly peppy ponytail when one of the other graduate students leans back in his chair and says, in a voice designed to be as obtrusive as possible, "Hot date tonight, Hale?"

"Work," Laura says, rereading a sentence for the third time. Her advisor's emails read like they were typed by a Capuchin monkey; she has to read them at least twice to understand what the hell he's attempting to convey.

"Well," says Rick, waggling his eyebrows, "you look like you're making a particular effort."

If by _effort _he means _eyeliner_, then he's right; Laura is wearing eyeliner to make the concealer look less noticeable, and the concealer is to hide that Laura had woken up that morning clawing at her eyes. Alpha injuries always take longer to heal, even if they're self-induced, and Laura doesn't need any more evidence to exacerbate her reputation in the Biology department as the weirdest graduate student in twenty years.

"Thanks?" Laura offers.

He gives her a pair of thumbs up. "Work it. Everyone hits on the bartender, don't they?"

"You say that like you're not a budding alcoholic who spends more times in bars than in the greenhouse," Ji says reprovingly from across the room, and Laura leaves fifteen minutes later to Ji and Rick still sniping at each other like the sexual tension isn't enough to drive everyone in their program up the wall.

Laura doesn't think about the effect question again until it's almost nine and she's been hit on so many times that she's actually lost count. Apparently the combination of emotional trauma + eyeliner + a shirt that's too small but it's Thursday and Derek _still hasn't done the goddamn laundry_ makes Laura especially irresistible to drunk college students. She gets a heart-felt love declaration from a girl celebrating her 21st birthday when Laura fishes the bar's t-shirt out of a box by the door to the kitchen. "You're just so _everything_," she tells Laura seriously, her head emerging from the neck of a XXL shirt like a drowned cat. "It's very sexy."

"Thanks," says Laura, dry but still much kinder than she'd been to Rick earlier that day.

"You're _welcome_," breathes the girl, and she takes herself and her mojito back to a table full of friends, wobbling on three-inch heels. Laura is grinning at her back—it's probably the most enjoyable experience she's had with students trying to pick her up while she's working—when she sees that the hunter is back, this time at the opposite end of the bar, closer to the door. He's half-hidden by a knot of people, but he leans forward when she catches sight of him.

Laura tries not to stomp too often because she's put her foot through a wooden floor before, but she stomps her way over to the hunter, her face morphing into an unattractive snarl. In her defense, it's been a shitty week and she's totally within her rights to blame its shittiness on him.

"What?" she demands when she's within range of his ears. "What can you _possibly_ want?"

"A whiskey would be nice," he says.

To fuck with him, she reaches for a bottle of the brown shit that they store on hand to dump into the pitchers of mixed drinks. His bitch-face isn't quite to Derek's level, but he uses his eyebrow well. "Let's not kid ourselves," he says.

Laura reluctantly returns the bottle of isopropyl alcohol masquerading as drinkable liquor to its place and goes to unearth the good whiskey from wherever Meredith has had it stashed this week. "I hope you die of liver cancer," she tells him pleasantly, shoving the glass across the bar towards him. "Please pay, leave, and never come back."

The hunter's mouth twists into the sort of half-grin that has never failed to make Laura extremely interested in sucking the lower lip of the person exhibiting it between her teeth. "A la votre." He tilts the glass in her direction and swallows a large mouthful, the line of his neck bristled and golden and _Jesus_.

Fuck everything.

Laura twirls so hard that the end of her ponytail whips around and slaps against the skin of her cheek. She tries not to listen for the hunter's heartbeat as she does her job, but her ears are traitorous little bastards and they pick it up quickly—and it's just so _steady_. He's got the kind of heartbeat that, Imogene would say, you can set a clock by.

She doesn't even realize that she's still listening to it until it changes; one moment, Laura is reaching for the shelf where they keep the extra bottles of pineapple juice, and the next the hunter's heartbeat has jacked up. She can smell the shift, from suspicious to greased and peppery, and heat floods the skin of her belly, prickling the hairs along her arms.

When she turns around, he's belatedly moving his eyes away from her ass. Laura knows that she's got a lot of junk in her trunk and she's appreciative of how the extra padding makes her a stealth wizard at Twister, but the hunter looks especially interested in it. Laura flushes and she hasn't blushed in twelve years, at least, but all it apparently takes is one silver fox of a mortal enemy and her body forgets that she's no longer a teenager.

There are ways to fake that kind of thing—he could, for example, have started thinking about his _wife_—but his eyes are so clear that Laura can tell, when they finally drift up her torso and make it to her face, he wants her. That explains why he's back at Hemingway's when she clearly has no interest in chatting with the local band of werewolf hunters.

He keeps his eyes on hers as he pulls out his wallet and stuffs a handful of bills into the tip jar to his left. "See you around," he says. His voice is at a normal volume, but Laura's ears pick it up easy as pie.

_You're in so much goddamn trouble_, Laura's human thinks, and her wolf agrees.

* * *

Derek is finishing his senior year of high school with the sort of lackluster enthusiasm that would've make Natalie proud. His grades are still fine, but in Beacon Hills 'fine' had covered every subject equally. In Pittsburgh, he's borderline failing calculus and biology but he has the highest grade possible in both his French language and English literature classes—according to the professor of the latter, he's some kind of lit crit savant.

"This is hilarious," Laura tells him frankly over dinner, scanning the enthusiastic handwritten letter that a message on their answering machine had ordered her to expect. "_I've never had such thorough analysis from any student in my fifteen years of teaching high school._" She puts down her fork and leans across the counter to punch Derek in the shoulder. "Dude. _Dude_. How did I not know that you're secretly a lit ninja?"

"I'm not," Derek staunchly denies, but he hunches over his bowl of spaghetti and avoids meeting her eyes.

"She wants to make sure that you're applying to college," Laura adds a few seconds later, reading the letter through to the signature. "Apparently you're being evasive."

Derek shrugs. "You know I've applied."

For Derek, _You know XYZ _has always been his default mode of communicating deceit. Their parents hadn't called him on it because it was always a helpful way to tag when Derek was lying, but Laura doesn't do parenting, so she gives him a long stare over the letter as she folds it back up and stuffs it into its envelope. "Well, I _thought_ you applied," she says.

Derek's heart jumps and then evens out; his breathing is steady. For a human, his lie and subsequent panic wouldn't be visible at all. Derek has been a shitty liar ever since he was first found in the pantry off of the kitchen, one chubby toddler hand stuck inside of the neck of the bottle where they stored the molasses, and in a family of werewolves it wasn't like he ever got a chance to practice his lying skills. He's gotten better since they moved from Beacon Hills.

Since their arrival in Pittsburgh, Laura has tried not to think about Derek in anything beyond immediate terms of her dinner-homework-laundry checklist of physical health, but she feels a few pricks along her vertebrae as she considers exactly _how_ and _why _Derek picked up lying to humans in the past two years. It's easier to contemplate her brother—the only member of her family not stuck in a vegetative state or scattered across a half-acre clearing in the middle of the Beacon Hills Preserve—in terms of his physical needs, because opening the can of Derek's mental issues clears a path for _Laura's _issues, and those don't need to be thought about.

"I saw the Pitt application," Laura says. "I saw you _send_ the Pitt application. So what the hell aren't you telling me, Derek?"

Derek shoves a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth. "I'm eighteen, Laura," he finally says. "I can apply wherever the hell I want."

_Fuck_. "Derek," she says, "please tell me you didn't—"

"Berkeley," he says shortly. The word sends a frisson of panic across the top layer of Laura's skin.

(Option one: Each letter speaks of months spent alone in the tiny Shadyside apartment, cooking dinner for herself and tending bar with no one to come home to and Derek, alone, in California, nearer than they've been in two years to the shell of their house and the bodies of all of the people that used to fill their heart.)

(Option two: Laura and Derek, holding their breath and trying not to swallow the ash in the air, visiting the beach and tasting the familiar sea and somehow _not_ drowning in the memories and the crushing weight of the open trees and the call of Beacon Hills.)

Derek's plan had always been Berkeley, since he was ten and learned about its English program, but Laura had given up dreams of Plant Pathology at OSC and chosen Pittsburgh because she'd known that relocating to Corvallis was a fundamentally stupid decision.

"Shit," Laura gasps, and she realizes that she might be having a little bit of a panic attack as her heart _ka-thumps_ awkwardly off-beat. You have to be fucking _kidding_ me, she thinks, but she can't get enough air into her lungs to wheeze it. Laura can't even really think about California before the air around her gets stale and her vision narrows and she has to change the subject or lock herself in a bathroom and sit on the toilet, letting her claws extend and retract from her fingertips; how the hell did Derek get up the strength to _apply _to _goddamn Berkeley_?

"Laura," Derek says, his bowl of spaghetti clattering onto the counter as he comes over it to grip her upper arms, "_Laura_," and her panic is spiraling rapidly out of control, because hers is reflecting his and it's like two mirrors facing each other; a descent into the pinprick of light where Laura has locked away Beacon Hills and Imogene and the one time she had met Kate Argent, lying bitch cunt, with her blithe and empty smile and the casual way that she had slipped her hand into the back pocket of Derek's jeans.

This is Laura's fault. It's always been Laura's fault, because Laura _should have said something_. She'd known about Derek's relationship and that his girlfriend was _way _too old for him; but what she'd done was slug him in the arm and say, "Nice catch, tiger," and she'd put condoms in all of his shoes to watch him turn red and then purple and almost swallow his tongue with embarrassment.

Laura was twenty and older and experienced and well versed in shitty relationship decisions and considering that she'd dated a Beta of the Grant pack for like twelve seconds before he'd tried to eviscerate her and frame a pack of migrants for it, Derek's blushes and tongue-tripping over Kate Argent should've set off a bazillion warning signs in Laura's head. But she hadn't known then what she knows know, about the silver blood that dripped over the Argent name; she'd thought that Derek's spot of teenage rebellion was the only one he was going to get before he went to Berkeley and got his degree in Lit so he could sit on the porch of the house in Coos Bay reading the Russians and saying intelligent, bullshitty things about them.

"I'm sorry," Laura thinks to say—does she say it? Her blood is so loud that it sounds like an ocean, crashing over her head and pushes her towards the surf, the undercurrent dragging her away from where Edith held tiny Greta above the water line, teaching her how to swim, how not to swallow the water up her nose—and it sets off a chain reaction, triggers thousands of apologies for everything that happened in Beacon Hills and the camping trip that had been her idea; the camping trip that has isolated her and her brother on the other side of a river of death from the rest of their family.

"Shut _up_," Derek snarls, but it's whisper-soft and he holds Laura's head against his chest and then they're both crying, ripped out of stasis, and Laura begs, Alpha forgotten and claws digging into Derek's shoulders, _don't go there don't go please_, and Derek says, "I just wanted to see if I could get in," and it tastes fake and metallic, but he follows it with, "I won't, Laura," and that's real, that's true.

* * *

Laura's body feels like one huge bruise when she wakes up on the kitchen floor, tangled with Derek so tightly that she can't tell if she is holding him or he is holding her. The front of her work shirt is covered in snot and the entire kitchen tastes like salt. Laura's eyes and mouth and nose ache from stressful use and Derek is a flushed, unhealthy shade of magenta.

Laura feels now like she should've felt two years ago; the scab scratched away and blood sluggishly pouring from an old wound. She lies on the floor and lets her heart push her body with steady pulses, rippling down her arms and legs and leaving her shell-shocked. The decision to bury everything and move on has proven to be just as stupid as Laura had originally suspected. She counts the speckles on the popcorn surface of the ceiling tiles and knows that Pittsburgh is still too close; she knows too that running won't fix anything about the names that push at her temples, the laughter that she'll never hear outside of nightmares.

But evidence indicates that Laura doesn't know how to settle somewhere and make it healthy. Two years in Pittsburgh and she and Derek are just as shattered as they were their first night _after _in Beacon Hills, holding mugs that said _Property of the Beacon County Sheriff's Department_ with shitty police station coffee going cold inside of them, waiting for Deputy Stilinski to kneel beside them and hand Laura the list of names.

All Laura can think to do is run.

* * *

Derek is accepted at NYU. New York is obvious and obviously desperate; but Laura _is_ desperate, so it fits in the kind of poetical way that Derek is going to learn to analyze if Laura has to tie him to a desk in a lecture hall herself.

* * *

_pushing down on me, pushing down on you_ | 2009

Laura doesn't expect to ever see the hunter again, which is stupid of her. Because she wasn't expecting him, she's off her game when she opens the bakery on a Wednesday morning and he's loitering outside with a collection of other businessmen who have become addicted to whatever illegal substance Frank puts in his knishes.

She stands there, one hand on the doorknob, the other on the key still turning in the lock, as he casually pushes away from an olive-colored car that screams _rental_, his face blandly engaged. He fakes it well, but his _eyes_—they can't do anything blandly, and they're definitely engaged.

In a half-fugue, Laura puts knishes in bags and pours out coffees and accepts twenties and tens and fives and nods thanks to the regulars who tip well in lieu of saying good morning—this is New York, after all—until the investment bankers and accountants have all vanished and it's just the hunter, stalking forward, hands resting by his sides where he can get quick access to the knife that Laura can see strapped to his hip under his jacket.

"_Seriously_?" Laura demands. "And don't spin me any bull about having a knish craving; you don't have abs like that at your age because you eat knishes for breakfast."

About two picoseconds later, Laura wants to stab herself for bringing his abs into this conversation; it doesn't exactly convey that she's a twenty-four-year-old Alpha with enough poise to watch her own back in a city filled with packs and pack wars.

"I appreciate your concern," the hunter says, "but I'm here on business."

"Buy something," Laura snarls, "or _leave_." She's not even being too aggressive; it's Frank's policy, and it's written in his blocky handwriting on a piece of cardstock above the register. Laura would point to it, but that would require disengaging her claws from the laminate of the counter.

"Odd for a pack to move like this," the hunter says, leaning forward and propping an elbow on the glass display case. "I'll take an onion and chive knish. If an Alpha decides to settle and build, she's not going to turn tail in two years and bolt."

Laura stops breathing; the control forces her to retract her claws, and then she calmly uses a piece of wax paper to put a chive knish in a brown bag. "Anything else?" she asks politely, shoving the bag across the counter at him.

"Small coffee," he says, and he continues as she turns her back to pour him a cup. "Unless, of course, you're _not_ an Alpha, in which case you're an Omega, and you wouldn't last long in this city if that's the case. No one misses a dead Omega."

With a stiff smile, Laura slams the coffee down in front of him. "The subtlety of your threatening leaves something to be desired," she informs him. "I have permission to be here from the Alpha of every pack on the goddamn island. If I go missing, they will _all_ miss me." It wouldn't be hard for a hunter of his caliber to discover that she's a Hale; two pointed questions at Hemmingway's and some skulking on the BioSci department website at Pitt would've given him that information.

Ergo, he knows she's a Hale and he knows she's an Alpha. With the rest of her family dead, the loss of another Hale Alpha at the hands of a hunter would be considered a shattering of the Code; open season on every Hunter in Manhattan. He doesn't _look_ particularly suicidal; Laura tilts her head slightly to the right and considers him. Usually she can smell psychopaths—their inability to process emotion makes them dimensionless, boring to her nose.

_Nothing_ about this hunter is boring to her nose. Her nose, along with the rest of her body, remembers the spiked aftertaste of his arousal, the way it had almost smelled like basil; green and spiced.

This line of questioning makes no sense.

"Is that all?" Laura asks.

He stares at her for a long time without blinking. It should make him look like a lizard, but all it does is reach inside of Laura to somewhere that needs warmth and lights a fucking _fire _under it. "Yes," he finally says.

"Five ninety-two," she tells him.

He hands her a ten; she catches sight of the Browning nestled against his side as he returns his wallet to his back pocket, the holster drawing tight along the inside curve of his shoulder. The sight of the holster on the pale grey of his Henley does more distracting things to Laura's wolf.

"Keep the change," he says with a small smirk, collecting his knish and his coffee and leaving, the bell on the door tinkling excitedly after him.

Fuck fuck _fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck_

_YES_, Laura's wolf thinks, which is not fucking helpful.

* * *

Laura still has the burgundy Toyota, even though driving in New York makes her want to eat most of the pedestrians and other drivers. She keeps it in the garage in the basement of their apartment building for a truly egregious fee because she needs it once a year for when she drives out to Beacon Hills to check on Peter. He smells strange; not just the burns, which are a tingly kind of sweet, but the complete _absence_ that wreathes him. Peter doesn't smell like pack anymore. It makes Laura's wolf shiver and retract into itself.

She wonders if it's her responsibility, as Alpha, to mark Peter as part of her pack. She's visited the storage container and read through the books on pack marking, but most of them reiterate the same thing—to truly be pack again, Peter needs to submit and accept her as his Alpha. He's not really in the best condition to be doing that.

So, in what became a yearly tradition after the shitshow that was the Hale family departure from Pittsburgh, Laura drives to Beacon Hills, timing it exactly so she arrives as visiting hours open and leaves as they end. She sees exactly one person, the primary care nurse, and she spends less than twelve hours total in Beacon Hills per trip, once you factor in how long it takes to scent-mark the edges of her territory. It's designed to be as painless as possible, but nothing hurts as much as sitting in an uncomfortable hospital chair across from her lifeless shell of an uncle, who smells _wrong_.

* * *

Laura doesn't make Derek come with her. If it were Imogene in that room, eyes locked on empty space, hands resting against the tops of her thighs, nothing would have been able to drag Laura within fifteen miles of Beacon Hills.

* * *

Two days after she gets back from Beacon Hills, after she spends approximately thirty-six hours glued to Derek's side, smelling the top of his head and being distracting as he attempts to say something about _Anna Karenina_ that hasn't already been said by a hundred years of literary criticism, Laura opens the bakery on Tuesday morning and her fortieth customer of the day, during the morning lull between ten and eleven, is a Beta of the Anceris pack.

"Hey, Laura," he says, slouching through the doorway and scuttling sideways down to the counter where Laura is replacing a stack of medium takeaway cups.

The Anceris pack controls the blocks leading up to the Hudson and out to Ellis Island; they always smell faintly of rotting fish, but that might be Laura's own prejudices against packs that chose to build their territory in cities. She can't help but think of them in terms of sewers and human stink and dead things sacrificed for urban development.

A Beta from the Anceris pack showing up at her place of work isn't exactly a good prelude to anything. "Good morning, Abílio," says Laura cautiously. The second that she opens her mouth, he cringes and begins to _stink_ of terror. Laura tops out at about five and a half feet on a day when she remembers to maintain good posture, and even if she's an Alpha she's still a girl in her early twenties, so Abílio's mind-numbing fear doesn't make any sense. He _knows_ Laura, and knows that she's not the physical kind of dominating Alpha. "What's up?" Laura asks.

Abílio shrinks even further inside of himself. It would normally be hilarious to watch a thirty-year-old bruiser of a Portuguese enforcer try to become one with Frank's hideous 1970's limeade wallpaper, but the reasons _why_ just make it unnerving.

"The Alpha of the Anceris Pack would like to offer greetings to the Alpha of the Hale Pack," Abílio begins, stuttering, and _fuck_, formal greetings are never a good sign.

"I accept her greetings," Laura says, and she moves to flip the sign over the door to 'closed.'

The folds in Abílio's forehead smooth slightly. The razor edge of his nervousness blunts slightly, but Laura can still curl her tongue around it. Her wolf wants to taste his pulse and gobble down his terror and submission until he's just a shaking wreck; her wolf wants to dominate, frequently, but Laura's human knows the consequences that would follow the destruction of another pack's Beta.

"The Alpha of the Anceris Pack sends word of a group of hunters gone Code-rogue in Brooklyn," Abílio says. His stuttering has lessened, even if he still has his head pressed against the wall, hands trembling. "She requests assistance from all local Alphas in eradicating the hunter threat. The kill has been sanctioned by the other hunters."

There are approximately seven million reasons why Laura should boot Abílio out the door and get on with her business. Laura's territory is technically three thousand miles away; and, to be honest, she's not sure she trusts the poorly-defined idea of a kill being sanctioned by other hunters. Derek is stable and doing well at NYU and Laura doesn't want to risk that for the excitement of a hunt.

On the other hand, a sanction from New York City's hunter population means that the band really has gone rogue—the bad kind of rogue, the kind that means dead humans and raids justified in terms of _acceptable civilian losses_—and Laura has a responsibility, as an Alpha, to serve as a protective body. Derek is still young and he's all that she has left. She doesn't want to lose him to a group of trigger-happy psychos with access to aconite-enhanced weaponry.

_The kill is sweet_, her wolf adds. Her mouth tingles with the remembrance of a true hunt—the snap of bone, tearing muscle into long strips, the musky taste of blood still passing through a beating heart. Laura hasn't hunted since Beacon Hills; she buys all of her meat at Mrs. Govindarajulu's market down the street from her and Derek's apartment.

"Yes," Laura says, hoping that she's thought this through, distracted by old memories and tastes. "The Alpha of the Hale Pack will provide help in eliminating the rogue hunters." She can see her irises turn red in the whites of Abílio's eyes; he blinks and drops to all fours, forced by her presence and his own instinct. The born wolves always know how to respond to an Alpha's power.

"Return to your Alpha with my message," says Laura dismissively and Abílio bolts. He's halfway down the block when the front door finally falls shut.

The rest of the morning is spent wrapping pies in white cardboard boxes and making new pots of coffee and telling a set of hipsters decked out in a dazzling display of poor knitting prowess that no, Frank's never has had and never _will_ have an espresso machine and if they want a goddamn soy latte, they can hit the Starbucks two blocks away and just deal with their desire for mainstream coffee drinks like normal people.

The door shuts behind the hipsters, two of whom Laura had verbally browbeaten into purchasing pastries, and Frank comes down the steps from his apartment, using the hem of his shirt to dry his hair. He's kind of stupidly hot—as in the kind of hot that makes people think he's stupid, like an Abercrombie and Fitch model—and his lips are way too big and he's got curly black hair that goes _everywhere_, but he's also a baking savant and hasn't seriously hit on Laura the entire time that she's worked for him, so he's filed in her books under _Pretty Okay_.

"Were you raised in a barn?" Laura asks him. "I know you own towels. I've seen them on the people I have to Pepper Potts when you abandon them after a one-night stand."

Frank drops his shirt and presses a hand to his heart. "Laura, darling," he says, "your concern fairly warms the cockles of my heart. It does."

A pair of women walking by the window stop and backtrack, fairly obviously watching Frank's ass in thread-worn jeans as he leans over to pick up a napkin someone had let drop outside of the trashcan. They have a brief, spirited discussion that involves a lot of curling their hair around their fingers and checking their lipstick, and then they open the door, just as Frank ducks into the kitchen behind the register to check on the afternoon baking.

The one on the left visibly deflates. "_Oh_," she murmurs involuntarily. Her friend looks similarly stricken. They've got _successful young professionals_ written all over them, from their perfect hair to their beautiful shoes—Steve Madden and Kate Spade, good choice and better choice, and Laura may have enough money to _buy_ Kate Spade but that doesn't make it a practical decision for someone who spends 40 hours a week behind a cash register—and their disappointment makes them alarmingly human. Laura doesn't want to find one of them behind a Dumpster in Carroll Gardens with a bullet hole in her forehead.

"Frank," Laura yells over her shoulder, "I've got to call and check up on Derek; can you take the register for a second?"

Frank appears in the doorframe like Calvin Klein magic and the women stop looking tired and downtrodden. Laura feels like she's earned a knish as a reward for her good deed of the day, so she grabs one covered in cheese as she shrugs on her winter coat and unearths her cell from where it's buried in one of the pockets. New York winters are hardly a concern for a werewolf who can self-regulate her internal temperature, but Laura likes the sensation of wrapping a wool scarf around her neck and buttoning up the front of her coat.

She does, in fact, need to call Derek about the Anceris/hunter mess, so it's not even that much of a lie. To give her feet something to do and lessen the likelihood of her being overheard, Laura sets her feet towards the children's playground three blocks away and dials Derek's number from memory.

He picks up the third ring. "If I fail this exam, I'm going to kill you."

"You'll do fine," Laura assures him. "After you graduate they're going to name a wing of the English department building after you."

"19UP doesn't have wings," Derek says, and then he grumbles under his breath about letting himself be drawn into a useless argument. "_What_, Laura?"

"Abílio Anceris came by the bakery this morning. There's a rogue hunter's pack in Brooklyn and the packs have received sanction from the city's other hunters to kill them."

There's a long, dark silence during which Laura can imagine the various unpleasant forms that Derek's face adopts. She knows they spend too much time together—of _course _she knows that, and it's probably unhealthy by human psychological standards, but they're not _human_—because she can predict down to the second when he finally decides how he's going to feel about this and takes in a breath to begin to speak again. "Did you agree to join the hunt?"

Her baby brother is the best at sounding bitchily judgey about everything, and she's not even taking his eyebrows into account right now. "I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter, Derek," Laura points out. "We need to keep strong in the face of the other Manhattan packs and there's no way in fucking hell I'm going to let a group of hunters wander around Brooklyn shooting up human bystanders."

Derek growls back, "There are _always_ other options, Laura," which is not exactly unexpected coming from the king of brooding about decisions.

"You're bad at the deference part of being a Beta," Laura comments, picking at the fringe along the edge of her scarf. She automatically filters out the harmless noises—the children shrieking in the park, mothers and fathers and nannies whispering to each other over steaming cups of coffee, dentists and lawyers tucked away in their offices—and focuses on the sounds coming from Derek's end of the line. It's quiet, in a familiar way; not their apartment, probably the branch of the NYPL nearby.

Derek says, "I was _always_ bad at that."

"Lies," Laura replies instantly. "Natalie and Erin were the rebellious ones. Miles was shaping up to be a little shit. You were the sweetest Beta that ever Beta'd."

It's one of those things that falls out of your mouth before you really think about it; it'd taken Laura two years to remember to use the proper grammar when talking about her family. In Pittsburgh there'd been a lot of 'Michael is' and 'Edith always says' that had prompted awkward confusion amongst her lab members—no one ever wants to be the one to say, _But I thought your whole family died?_

Derek stops breathing. It's his defense mechanism, as if shutting down bodily functions will somehow stop the pain in his chest. Laura's a big believer in pretending that you don't have any issues that need work; Derek's the one who sits and stews and reads dark, conceptually torturous Russian novels and pretends like it's just for his degree.

"You need practice with rebellious behavior," Derek finally says, flatly. "Starting now." He hangs up.

It startles a laugh out of Laura, and _not_ the good kind. A woman walking next to Laura freezes and then pulls her toddler to the other side of her body, away from Laura. For some reason, that just makes her laugh harder. As she passes by a set of glossy double-doors, she pauses to examine her reflection; she looks incredibly unthreatening, the hard line of her jaw masked by a fluffy mustard-colored scarf, her short body wrapped in a grey wool coat. Before the fire, Laura exceled at hiding in plain sight better than any other hunter or werewolf she'd ever met.

Becoming an Alpha has a way of changing things.

* * *

Laura had flatly told Derek that over her dead body was he going to join a dangerous scavenger hunt the night before three midterms in various classes required for graduation, and he'd sulkily acquiesced in poor grace, so Laura is (thank _GOD_) alone in a dark alley when she skids around a corner chasing an unfamiliar scent and runs full-body into her favorite hunter.

Everything would've ended more picturesquely and like a scene of a romantic comedy if Laura hadn't responded by aiming for his throat with his claws and he hadn't reacted by jamming an arrow towards her ribcage. They both swing to their respective lefts and therefore both miss. Laura hits a brick wall and bounces off, landing on all fours with her claws in concrete to steady her; the hunter slams into a Dumpster and uses it to prop himself up as he gets his breath back.

A second later Laura gets a mouthful of a familiar taste and straightens up with a bitter, "Oh god, it's _you_."

The hunter lowers his bow so it's pointing at the ground between them. "You're a little south for your grid, aren't you?"

"Following a scent trail," Laura says through a mouthful of canines. She hopes the hunter can see them as they distend her jaw, pushing her pretty face into an ugly place, glistening like they always are. She wants him to appreciate that she's dangerous, because then maybe he'll stop fucking showing up at her place of goddamn work. "Doesn't really matter about the grid."

"Well," says the hunter, gesturing with his bow. "Lead the way."

Laura shivers and settles back onto the balls of her feet, lowering herself into a familiar crouch. "Try to keep up," she shouts over her shoulder as she leaps, clearing a pile of packing crates and dodging the hanging edge of a fire escape. His breathing is loud but focused; he's a born hunter, she can smell it on him now like she can smell it on other wolves. The breeding always shows on the hunt.

She runs for a few blocks parallel to New York Ave, and then cuts over sharply at the Kings County Hospital Center. She's two blocks from the part of Brooklyn that's so bad it doesn't even qualify as downtrodden or crime-ridden when the scent pulls up sharply, outside of an apartment complex that's practically begging for the CDC to show up and fumigate.

In her half-human shift it's difficult to pinpoint where she should be looking, so she melts into the shadows and transforms fully, all four paws planted to the ground, her fur rippling down her shoulder blades and ripping through her shirt and jeans. She kicks off the human clothing and concentrates on the apartment building and rooms inside, trying to cross-reference scent with familiar hunter sounds—gun safety being engaged or disengaged, the dull _thunk_ of steel-toed boots, the rattle of ammo inside a box—and she's narrowed it to the sixth floor when she hears the hunter come hard to her left and stop.

She comes out from the shadow and his gun is immediately in her face, safety off, his hands steady. She approves of the switch; this neighborhood sees a lot of guns, but a compound bow would raise some eyebrows.

Laura gives him two seconds to adjust to her wolf form, and then she uses her nose to nudge his gun to her left. She points her head towards the apartment building.

"Are you fucking kidding me," the hunter whispers, eyeing the building's general decay. "Jesus, this is embarrassing." He pulls an ugly burner cell from his pocket and hits the second speed dial. Laura uses half of her attention to keep tabs on his conversation—"Near East 52nd and Winthrop; tag the next person in the goddamn phone tree, Jefferson, I don't care if they have a tail or not"—and the other half to make sure that the hunters aren't going to bolt any time soon.

"Come on," the hunter says, tilting his head back towards a darkened corner. "If they look out the window they're going to notice us." Laura shifts backwards, keeping herself between him and the building until they're sandwiched in a carved-out stoop that had looked much roomier from the other end of the street. Laura's human has to exert a lot of effort to be heard over the pulsing roar of her wolf, which wants to tear out the throats of every hunter in that building and fuck the one sitting next to her, in that order, preferably followed by eating one of the larger predators that she'd smelled hiding in Prospect Park. Fox sounds remarkably appetizing after the four hours she'd spent running her grid in Stuyvesant.

For the seven minutes that it takes every member of their search party to make it within strike radius, Laura desperately ignores every sense that isn't directly involved in surveying the shitty apartment filled with psycho hunters and she lies like a freaking rug to herself that she isn't pointed towards the cool spot to her left that is the hunter. His core temperature is cooler than hers; it makes the skin along her left side bunch and the fur rustle.

_Everything about this is seriously fucked up_, Laura's human tells her, as if that's some kind of surprise.

At exactly eight minutes—the hunters had synchronized their watches; Laura had watched, disbelieving, and then rolled her eyes in the general direction of Fatima Anceris; she always knows what time it is, because the moon tells her wolf that sort of biologically necessary information—wolves and hunters melt out of the shadows and take to the sixth floor of the building. There are too many of them for the rogue hunters to stand a chance. Ten minutes and forty-three seconds after the original phone call, Laura rips out the throat of the last hunter and settles back on her haunches.

Her human has very particular feelings about blood matted into fur; she has to ignore the voice in the back of her head shouting about how unsanitary she is and how much showering she's going to have to suffer before she'll be fit for human consumption as the hunters quietly and efficiently work the scene, putting bricks of cocaine in obvious locations and digging knives into flesh to disguise wounds made by claws.

It's here, when Laura licks the back of her paw and examines one of her claws for a split nail—those things are a bitch to deal with in wolf form; running on an exposed nerve feels like stepping into a vat of acid—that she learns that her hunter's name is Chris. All of the hunters are going by first names, to avoid the stickiness of the network of blood feuds that runs between wolf and hunter families.

Laura's not stupid enough to think taking the Brooklyn Bridge back to Manhattan as a wolf is at all a good idea. Asking a wolf from another pack for an item of clothing is a _big_ no-no, as Laura's as interested in getting hitched to a member of one of the New York packs as she is in a split nail. They're pretty much universally morons, and the ones that aren't morons are twenty-five years older than Laura on average and either ugly as sin or already mated.

_This is what you get_, her human points out, _for not stripping before you shifted_.

Well. Hopefully someone will think she's a dog.

Laura is the last of the packs to leave the hunters to their business. She catches Chris' eye as she slinks out onto the fire escape where—_success!_—someone who is clearly a new tenant has left clothing out to dry. There aren't any pants because that would be just too kind of the universe at large, but there's a big cardigan of the boyfriend variety tucked under a pair of bricks to keep it from blowing away. Laura decides immediately to claim it as reward for murdering the owner's ruthless sociopathic neighbors. She nudges it with her nose; it smells like baking soda and cheap detergent and heavily chlorinated water, none of which are terribly offensive to her.

She shifts back into human form from the bottom up, shivering at the cold slaps against the sweaty skin of her back and the line of her throat that's still covered in blood. It's begun to dry and Laura leans over the edge of the balcony and rubs her chest vigorously with the flat of her palm, peeling away the blood and sending it like ruby-colored snowflakes down towards the alley. She licks her palm and fingers and rubs against her chin; she's already walking back home in a sweater, there's no need for her to look like _more_ of a junkie.

When she comes onto her knees to move the bricks and take the sweater, she hears him; the steady heartbeat and its skyrocketing, the half-familiar smell tickling her nose. She doesn't want to, but she can't help herself—she looks over her shoulder, hair a tangled mess down her back, and sees Chris in the doorway to the living room, broad shoulders blocking her view in and their view out. If he's protecting her honor from the lustful male gaze, he's sort of late to the party—Laura's got plenty of issues, but nudity isn't one of them.

Besides, he's doing enough male gazing of his own. His mouth is in a firm line that tells her all she needs to know about how much he hates himself for finding her attractive. Hunters are as monogamous as wolves in the old families; it's another thing that comes out in the breeding. "You should go," he says quietly. There are two layers of glass and a metal screen between them but she can hear him as if he's speaking into her ear. She watches his lips move for the novelty of it. "Truces are tricky things."

"Hate to be eviscerated after our victory," Laura says cheerfully, still blood-speckled and naked. Her blood is a living thing inside her veins, pushing and pulling with the force of the moon, making her fingers tingle and her head light. She wants to break through the window and drag Chris to the floor and bite his throat until she can swallow the pepper and spice and basil freshness of his scent into her belly. Her breasts swell with the thought and her hips sag slightly as her legs part, knees biting into the grillwork of the fire escape.

Chris' fingers slide down the barrel of his sawed-off and lock around the base, knuckles pale. If he were a wolf, he'd be able to smell her and how much she wants him. The bare March wind whistles up and slices into the gap between Laura's legs. She imagines for a second that it's his cold fingers, gun oil and aconite and wide palms, thumb rubbing along the top of her clit, and then she gets the reality check that she's fantasizing about a _hunter_ on a fire escape in the shittiest part of Brooklyn.

Laura tugs the sweater out from under the bricks and pulls it over her head without bothering to unbutton it. It falls to mid-thigh and her nipples are just hidden inside the deep V of the neck if she doesn't let the shoulders fall. Only its lack of mesh keeps it from being the most scandalous thing Laura has ever worn.

She takes to her feet completely, curling her toes into the gaps in the iron of the fire escape, and tries to pretend that Chris isn't still watching and that he doesn't test her self-control in a way that defies explanation, logic, and self-possession. Laura can actually feel her wolf pounding against the inside of her ribcage, begging her to _TAKE_.

When she chances a look at Chris because Hales do masochism like nobody's business, he lifts his right thumb to his chin and rubs it back and forth. Laura spends an unhealthy amount of time imagining sucking his thumb into her mouth and laving the tip with her tongue and biting against the protective layer of his nail before she licks her middle and forefinger and scrubs at the right corner of her mouth.

"Okay?" she asks, as if he'll be able to hear.

He nods, once, and drops his hand. It falls to his gun, and then down to his side. Laura has her forefinger back in her mouth before she can really think it through, and she licks the last of the blood from the webbing between her fingers. Hunter blood is always slightly unsatisfying and vaguely moldly, as if it's gone off.

Chris' blood pumps faster, pushes his scent further, and nearly knocks Laura back on her heels. She tempts herself for a handful of seconds, considering Chris' blood. Would it taste like pesto? It smells like it would. She can imagine fairly easily what licking Chris' blood from her fingers would taste like. The groves back in Beacon Hills Preserve, where the ash trees grow in naturally protective rings, had always been peppery to Laura's nose.

This is a series of fundamentally shitty decisions waiting to happen, and Laura's too hopped up on the hunt to be responsible for anything, even fucking a married man who clearly wants to wrap her hair around her fist and string her out against the nearest wall.

Laura is an adult. Laura is at least half human. She's not an animal.

Laura leaves. In the interest of self-preservation, she throws herself off of the fire escape, tucks her legs into a roll, and pops her dislocated shoulder back in before she even has time to think about the pain. She runs for Manhattan, and she doesn't stop, even when a policeman on a motorcycle pauses at a red light and says, "What the _ever loving fuck_," as Laura dashes across the intersection on bare feet and in her stolen cardigan.

She throws the cardigan into one of the Dumpsters in the alley behind her apartment building, climbs to the fourth floor naked and desperately hoping that none of her neighbors are awake, and uses a claw to disengage the latch on her bedroom window. She can hear Derek studiously plodding away at his revising in his room. "I'm home," she tells him, a useless courtesy, and then, "I'm taking a shower to get this stink off of me."

Derek is a mess at a lot of things and he's always been at most a half-hearted werewolf, so there's at least 40% of a hope that he won't be able to recognize Laura's lust and frustrated desire. She loves her baby brother and she won't hide it from him if he asks, but there is so much that she's not even vaguely prepared to talk about. The parallels between the surviving Hale siblings and their attraction to unsuitable hunters will never be funny or ironic or a bonding experience—it's just painful.

* * *

Chris is waiting outside of the bakery two weeks later, hands curled loosely in the pockets of his coat. "Good morning," he says.

"Oh my fucking god, Chris," Laura says reflexively. She'd had her nose buried in a cup of coffee and hadn't exactly anticipated seeing Chris this morning—or at all, really, for the rest of her life. "What are you _doing_ here?" she demands. "This has stopped being creepy and started being just plain fucking weird. You know who I am. You know why I'm here."

There's a long second wherein Chris wavers between continuing whatever senseless line of deceit he'd originally intended and rolling with Laura's accusation and taking another mode of attack. She can see it in his face, because she can't really look away from him. She swallows too much of her coffee too fast and uses the fleeting burn down the line of her esophagus to center herself before she does something especially idiotic, like shift and tackle Chris into the bakery.

"Yes, Laura," he finally says as she throws the empty cup into a trashcan. "I know who you are."

It wasn't like Laura was waiting for her name out of his lips to be a revelation, but it kind of is. Her Alpha ears hear every place where his tongue rasps against the inside of his mouth. She wants to suck his tongue inside her mouth and bite bite _bite_ every syllable out of him until he can only make breathless, wrecked noises.

Laura tries to think of the last time she was this attracted to someone to make a pithy mental comparison, but there isn't a single name that comes to mind. Her wolf scrambles everything up inside her head and her body, pulling at her control and scattering the parts of Laura's human that she keeps dominant for the sake of the humans with whom she lives. Her wolf wants to suck on the pulse in Chris' neck and fuck him inside the bakery, where chives and butter and cheese make everything smell like warmth and home.

Jesus _fuck_. "Well," Laura says brusquely, looking down at her keys so she doesn't end up growing an extra set of teeth in the middle of the goddamn street. "This has been nice. Please don't wait two years until the next time I see you—make it two decades, at least."

Chris' pulse flickers.

"Or," Laura adds, tapping a fingernail against the key to the front door of the bakery, "forever. You can also do that."

_Please_, her human urges, _please, walk the fuck away_.

"Every time I come to speak with you, something else seems to come up," Chris comments quietly, like he's a member of the homeowner's association come to check up on the state of her front yard. He makes it sound so _human_, so benign, like Laura isn't a blend of instinct and psychologically damaging behavior.

"That's what happens," Laura says, trying for airy and maybe succeeding—she can't really judge her own voice, not over the sound of her throat trying to light itself on fire with want—"when you corner an Alpha trying to mind her own goddamn business."

"You ran," Chris continues, as if Laura's interruption and thinly veiled threat is beside the point, "and left your territory unclaimed."

If Laura moves her nail very slowly, she can hear a shift in the metal quality of the key; it's softer in the middle, from being nestled against the heat of Laura's hip, and there's a series of uneven dips where she's unwittingly bent the key with her werewolf strength. "The Hale pack still runs over that land," she finally says. "Not that it's any of your business, hunter."

"Yes," agrees Chris, fake and pleasant, so false it grits between her teeth, "once a year you go back and scratch some trees. That's going to be very effective against migrant packs."

Laura wants to crawl inside Chris and do lots of unsavory things to his body, but that doesn't given him free reign over the soft, unprotected parts of her. "If you have advice on how an Alpha werewolf should run her pack," she tells him, letting in the push of red from the corners of her eyes and the flow of saliva that prepares her mouth for her extra teeth, "why don't you leave a comment card?"

Chris steps forward; he tries to use his body to crowd her, but she has an open street to her back and the reminder of his _size_, the press of his shoulders and the firmness of his chest, is counterproductive to anything except Laura latching her teeth into his collarbone and dragging him into an alley. "You have a responsibility," he begins, and this part is clearly practiced—his heart runs smoothly into the head of the sentence—"and you can pretend to be human up and down this coast for as long as you want, but the Hales abided by the Code and I'm not going to see that land go to one of the packs from Wisconsin or Nevada because you're too busy burying your head in the sand."

"_I am not human_," Laura snarls. Her jaw clicks and pops out; her teeth push against the top of her gums, begging to be released, and her hair tries to climb back into her head, eager to redistribute itself across her body. The pins holding her hair in a bun against the back of her head protest the sudden yank and snap. She reaches out and grabs the front of Chris' Henley, where it gapes from underneath his winter coat and the exposed skin begs her to suck the sweat out of his pores. The door is too complicated right now; Laura turns and pulls him around the corner, into the alley down the side of the bakery. "No one will take our land, hunter."

"It's not exactly well-defended," Chris says calmly, like she can't hear his heart leap for escape, like she isn't pushing her breasts against his chest, her fingers knotting and pulling at his shirt. The cloth of his shirt protests the intrusion of her claws.

"It is _Hale land_," Laura says, "and we _mourn_. We're not _animals_."

What she means is, she has seven years. For the loss of the Alpha and the rest of her pack, she will receive seven years' grace from the other packs. She is supposed to be building. She knows; she's read it in the books in Eureka, the ones that Derek doesn't know about, and heard it in the lore that Edith had always spun into tales for the children at Christmas. But Laura knows Derek isn't ready for their pack to be any bigger and Derek has been and always will be her greatest priority.

"You're not human, you're not animal," Chris says snidely; he's clearly exposed to teenagers on a regular basis, because it's such an _adolescent_ tone. "Make a choice."

Because Laura can recognize that kind of manipulation, it doesn't push her over the edge. "For a born hunter," she comments, lethal and level and low, "you don't seem to understand how werewolves work."

"We watch and we regulate," Chris says. "We don't perform psychological evaluations."

The last thing Laura wants to do is get into a philosophical discussion with a hunter about werewolf-hunter dynamics in an alleyway at six in the morning, especially when it's taking most of her considerable control not to rub up against him like some kind of dog in heat, but for a second, she feels tempted. Chris is clearly not a moron and he's not got a vested interest in appearing surly and unhelpful; if the members of his family didn't swear an oath at a young age to kill Laura's species, she'd maybe even like him.

"Cute," she says. The wreck of his heart is still pressing against her eardrums, but she no longer wants to remove his head from his body; she can even feel her human begin to prevail against her wolf. She retracts her claws but keeps her fingers tangled in his shirt, for leverage. "My point stands. My land is my concern; there's no reason for you to be involved."

Her voice has softened without conscious input; there's silk over threat, now, and she can feel the pounding of his heart at their point of contact. A solid line is drawn between his and hers. An exhale lingers as it drifts across her forehead and rustles her hair where it's tumbling in a half-mess over her left shoulder.

"Think of us like the IRS," Chris quips. She can hear where it's supposed to fall hard and flat, humor over threat, but his breathing renders the point moot.

Laura laughs. "I'm more afraid of the IRS than I am of you, Chris."

It's a negligible point because Laura isn't afraid of the IRS and if she wastes time to think about hunters that she fears, Kate Argent falls higher on the list than someone who can't keep his hands from shaking near her, but Chris takes it as a taunt. Years of training make the point of pivot unpredictable; his breathing doesn't change at all as he plants and turns and slams Laura against the brick wall of Frank's building.

Whatever threat he means to utter gets lost because sparks light along the fringes of her vision when Laura's head hits brick and, for the first time in her life, Laura is knocked senseless. She rears up and uses her still-solid hold on his shirt to lever herself into his mouth and _shit shit shit_ he tastes like basil and mint, toothpaste and coffee and stale sleep, and his teeth sink into her lip without a whisper of resistance. She bites back, pushing herself onto one toe and using the curve of her leg to yank him closer. He falls against her body with a rush and her blood all rises into her ears and she licks his mouth open and falls in further, sucking his tongue into her mouth and swallowing, compulsively, her throat working as her fingers sink into his shoulders.

His palms begin with pinning her shoulders to the wall and then they shift, lower, to her upper arms, and his thumbs brush against the outside of her breasts. For someone who kisses like he wants to fuck her mouth open, his hands stay in strictly junior high territory, and Laura is two seconds from clawing his shirt over his head and showing him that he can, in fact, put his oil-stained hands on her nipples and she won't exactly break, when she hits his shoulder holster.

Her human thinks _shit fuck_ because that goddamn holster is sexy as fuck, but her wolf smells the aconite in the bullets inside his Browning and she slams herself backwards, mouth peeling from his with a discomfiting sound like the release of plugged drain. His mouth is shiny from spit and red from her teeth.

"Oh my _fucking god_," Laura says. "You are _married_."

Chris never stops smelling peppery and fuckable as he says, "_Really_?" almost involuntarily, judging by the self-hate that flickers alive on his face.

"I don't fuck married men," Laura protests. It takes one good shove for her to dislodge him; she can smell the capillaries break under his skin as he takes two steps back to recover the momentum. "Okay, well, that never happened," she says, to herself and to a pigeon that's paused in where it's pecking at the crumbs surrounding Frank's Dumpster. "Right. Great. Okay. You need to leave and stop questioning the decisions I make as Alpha."

Chris still looks shell-shocked—probably because he's never even contemplated fucking someone other than his wife and now he has Laura's scent rubbed into his clothes—but he makes a solid effort to recover. He ends up doing it better than Laura would have predicted. "We watch that area," he finally says, his voice rough but moderately more professional. "We always have."

Laura had assumed, from the visits in Pittsburgh and here, that he was part of a migrant hunter family, but apparently not. "The Argents watch there," she says. Later, she'll wonder why she said it that way—such a stupid thing to say. Of all the ways that Laura could've opened herself up for that conversation, _The Argents watch there_ is at least number five on Dumbest Options, maybe even number three. They're not even her own words; she's lifted them from Peter's journal, which had been the first place she'd looked when she was trembling with anger and loss and trying to figure out why the fucking hell Derek's secret older girlfriend had set their house on fire.

"Yes," Chris says. "We do."

There's a weird second where Laura stares at a particularly stubborn hair is protruding from the clenched line of Chris' jaw; he must have missed it while he was shaving this morning. With a low whine, her stomach tries to crawl its way out of her throat. She hasn't vomited since she accidentally swallowed mountain ash bark during a project for her Ecology lab at HSU; she wonders abstractly if this will break her record. _You fucking mess_, her human says as Laura tries not to gag. She presses her palm to her mouth and uses the pack scent that clings to her pulse points to center herself.

She smells like Chris. She smells like _Argent_.

"Go _away_," Laura snarls, garbling the words. "Run _now_, Argent, before I kill you." The shift sounds like a distant toll of a bell, but she can already feel it crawl across her skin in long shivers. When Chris shows no sign of moving, Laura drops her hand and the pretenses and lets her head lead the shift. "_GO_," she roars, and the last of her yell is swallowed by her wolf's snout, ill suited for vowels that don't end in liquid _L_s.

Chris unsnaps the holster on his gun and takes off. He moves away from the heavily trafficked street, deeper into the network of alleys that connect Frank's neighborhood, and before Laura can make another stupid decision, like one that will result in a worse blood feud or her brother having no living family members, she pounces on the pigeon.

Its neck snaps with a single jerk, and then Laura is left with a mouthful of pigeon—which is disgusting—and dripping with blood and a host of human concerns that she is currently unable to deal with, like a bakery that needs to be open in twenty minutes and a scent trail that her wolf wants to follow. She can't predict what will happen if she catches Chris, if she'll want to kill him or fuck him or a particularly morbid combination of both, and none of those are options her human could live with.

So Laura chokes down the pigeon and then still ends up shifting back and vomiting it up, blood and little bones and the filth of Manhattan's bird population heavy on her tongue. That's how Frank finds her, ten minutes after she should've dragged him from the depths of the kitchen to man the counter for the morning rush: her clothes shredded and her surrounded by and covered in blood and a half-digested pigeon.

"Oh my god, Laura," says Frank, shocked open and scared, and she lets him pull her to her feet and wrap her in his flannel overshirt, his human hands gentle and soft against the protruding bones of her shoulder blades. She lets him pour her into his shower and then she puts on a pair of pajama pants and a Knicks t-shirt that will send Derek into conniptions and falls into his bed. It smells like Frank and familiarity and now she does, too, like his lemon body-wash and his absurdly expensive shampoo and the sticky flour scent of everything in the building.

Frank holds her hand until she pretends to fall asleep. After he leaves, quietly shutting the door behind him, she listens with her eyes shut until his footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs and she hears the tinkle of the bell as he unlocks the front door of the bakery and lets in a string of crabby early-morning customers. He's left her cell phone and key ring, both undamaged, on the table next to the bed, and she lifts her arm just enough out of the nest of blankets to snag her phone.

"Hey," she croaks when Derek answers.

"What," Derek says, voice steeped in sleep.

"Nothing," Laura says. "Go back to sleep but leave the phone on, okay?"

Derek mumbles, "Whatever," and does as she asks, propping his open phone against the stack of books on his bedside table and settling back down. She lets his heartbeat center her world, until everything else she hears is just an echo of it, tinny and far away and false.

* * *

_this time i know it's for real_ | 2011

So the Camaro might've been an anger-induced purchase, Laura fully recognizes that, but it's not exactly like she'd been spending any of the ridiculous amounts of money she and Derek had collected from seven insurance policies and if she wanted to buy a Camaro in the aftermath of a shitty life decision like falling in heavy lust with the older brother of the hunter who murdered almost the entirety of her family, it was her prerogative.

"Okay," Derek had said in response to a highly edited version of this line of reasoning. "Do I get to drive it?"

"_No_," Laura had gasped, mock-affronted, and then they had proceeded to have a wrestling match over the keys, which Laura had won by kneeing Derek in the nuts, a move that was about 78% accident and 22% cruel intent.

She's thankful for her splurge when she's halfway across Ohio and the radio is a vast wasteland of Kenny Chesney and AC/DC and she can let out some of her frustration by gunning the engine in her snarling panther of a car. There's not a cop for twenty miles and it's close to ten at night so she has the stretch outside of Toledo almost entirely to herself.

Early the next morning, Laura stops at a gas station in Montpelier and refills her tank. She's been leery of rest stops in general ever since that first trip from Beacon Hills, with Derek swallowing down a barbed arrow from a set of hunters that shouldn't have even known they were there, but this one appears normal and, when she pays the cashier for a cup of exceptionally shitty coffee and a packaged pastry, he stares down her shirt and doesn't scent of nervousness.

Laura takes the opportunity provided by a nearly empty stop and calls Derek. "_What_," he answers. "Laura, it's seven in the goddamn morning. I had a shift until two last night."

"Poor baby," Laura coos. "Listen to you. College coddled you."

"Yeah, and it turned you into a psychopath," Derek mumbles. "I'm hanging up."

"No, no, wait," Laura says hurriedly, laughing. "This is the last time I'm going to stop for a while; tell me how you are." She can diagnose plenty through the phone, like his heart and his breathing and the rustling that tells her that he's not at home. "Or, tell me _who_?"

There's a pause as Derek peels himself out of bed and walks across a carpeted floor. "Just a girl from one of my classes last year," he says dismissively after there's a _snick_ of a closed door. "She showed up at the shop with a busted fuel line."

"I bet _something_ was busted," Laura says with a heavy-handed snicker. "And I'm sure you fixed her up real good."

"You're hilarious," Derek says flatly. In a whip-fast change of conversation, he says accusingly, "Are you eating rest stop shit for breakfast?"

"No," Laura lies, shoving the pastry into her cheek so she can speak freely.

Derek snorts. "'Eat your vegetables, Derek,'" he says in high-pitched mimicry of Laura's voice. "'Teenage werewolves can't survive solely on pizza.' You're such a hypocrite."

Swallowing a particularly tough piece of overly sweet preserved apple, Laura insists, "I'm older, it's different."

"I'm _bigger_," Derek growls, and Laura giggles.

"Did your friend find that kind of thing attractive?" she asks. "The whole monosyllabic mechanic shtick? I'm telling you, Derek, ever since _Drive _came out, girls are digging it." She tries to wash down the pastry with coffee but it tastes like phlegm and dirty stove burners. "_Yeck_."

"Stop pretending coffee has any effect on your body," Derek tells her irritably, completely ignoring her point about Ryan Gosling.

"It's psychosomatic," Laura reminds him. The argument is warm and familiar, like the hiking boots that Laura kicks against the bumper of her car. "Mornings aren't mornings without coffee." She means the smell, the tingle along the back of her throat that comes from waking up to the soft _drip drip drip _of the automated coffeemaker in the kitchen. She means waking up and knowing that their mother is in the kitchen, performing the only cooking task she can be relied upon not to fuck up, running through the daily crossword with her reading glasses sliding down her nose.

"Yeah," Derek says after a long pause.

It will always hurt; it will always cut Laura's chest in half to think about it. But New York and Pittsburgh have numbed some of it and Laura has shoved away the rest. She's built a wall between herself and Derek and the memories, and it's more stable now than it has ever been.

* * *

Laura hasn't seen Chris Argent in two years, which is smart of him. She's still not entirely sure she won't kill him first and regret it later, when she's swallowing down his blood in her mouth and picking pieces of hair from between her teeth.

* * *

Twenty miles outside of Des Moines, Laura recognizes within herself the tingles that precede a break with reality and to stave off the shivers that isolation bring with it, she flicks on the radio. She could plug her phone into the car's stereo and just listen to the collection of music she has stashed there, but Laura likes the chore of flicking between stations. She weighs Katy Perry (no) against Linkin Park (_no_) against 80s hair bands (_NO_) and then lands on an inoffensive alternative station that seems to be having a Bon Iver conniption.

She likes Bon Iver in theory but by the time St. Vincent makes it on, Laura wants to claw out her own eyes and pour them into a singer-songwriter's guitar, so she hits _scan_ again and immediately stops because Derek hates Nicki Minaj with single-minded disdain and Laura likes taking advantage.

It turns out that listening to "Moment 4 Life" without Derek cringing in the passenger seat is at most half as fun, so Laura gives up on bothering an imaginary Derek and switches to NPR. That lasts until Omaha, and then, stuck in a traffic jam, fingers trembling against the wheel, Laura debates the merits of calling her brother and listening to his heartbeat versus finding music she can actually stand. There's the possibility that nothing will calm her, but Laura has to do _something_. Every trip to Beacon Hills ends up like this—Laura shivering and antsy without her pack, untethered and probably slightly unhinged—and at this point, the only question is when the break will hit.

It hits in Lexington.

"This is healthy," Laura lies to herself. "This is _understandable_." She plugs in her phone and opens the music app, eyes on the playlist labeled MOM. She's made it to Nebraska, at least, which is the furthest she's ever managed without pulling over to the shoulder and talking herself out of a panic attack.

The only way she survives this process is to make a conscious shift in her operating techniques, so she presses play and thinks, _This is fine, it's okay, it'll be okay_, and the first song that comes up on shuffle is "Bicycle Race."

Laura's nose always tricks her here; she can smell her mother and Imogene, the peculiar blend of their twin scents, cedar and laurel and Chanel No. 5. Her mother had stopped wearing perfume when the twins had been born and it was obvious from the way that they had busted their first playpen that they would be a werewolves, but she always smelled of it strongly, like she'd worn it for so long that it'd become an integral part of herself.

Laura hasn't cried since Pittsburgh, and it's not like Freddie Mercury's voice is capable of actually wringing moisture from her, so she focuses on the road and the police nearby and the chatter on scanners about traffic and speed traps and the way that the outside changes the further west she drives. Fields and desert and mountains blur together until it's nearing eleven and Laura is in Susanville, her usual stopover the night before her visit. It's just outside of her territory but there haven't aren't any packs between Beacon Hills and Reno and she's never run into any trouble.

Out, west, in front of Laura, stretches the forest and then the coast. Her nose isn't good enough to catch the salt but she can imagine it, like she can imagine Imogene leaning into Laura's mother and shouting, "_Caviar and cigarettes!_" and laughing.

Laura checks into a motel off of the highway and eats a burger in her room, listening to the playlist on its lowest volume setting with headphones. Her fries are soggy and cold by the time she gets to them and she sticks them one by one into an open packet of ketchup, humming to the chorus of "Sexy Sadie" and ignoring the sound of her neighbors having enthusiastic extramarital sex.

Susanville is just deserted enough that Laura can throw away her trash, leave her phone charging, and slip down the road to where the forest melts into the fringe of the town. She strips quickly, skin warming from the impending rush of the change, and puts her clothes high off the ground, in a tree that doesn't look like it's hiding any animals that would likely take Laura's clothes and use them for nest-building.

The full moon is a week and a half away and Laura takes the shift in a jump, throwing her wolf forward and her human back, and she lands in a furred crouch. Animals scatter at the sudden emergence of a predator; overhead, an owl screeches and a mouse squeaks and bolts for cover. New York is home because her pack is there, but the forests of California are _always_ Laura's and they call to her in way that she hadn't anticipated, her first time back in Beacon Hills after two years away. Her human is scarred by the loss of her family, but her wolf craves to stay and build; her wolf wants to plant roots in Beacon Hills and grow a new pack.

Laura burns through her anticipation for the next day and stalks a deer for the fun of it, tackling it to the ground and playfully gumming at its neck before letting it go. It'd be good for the rest of the forest if Laura just killed it, but she's not hungry and that seems like a waste. She lets the deer, heart rabbit-fast and frenetic, bolt for the river, and she half-heartedly pounces on a few hares before she admits to herself that she can't hunt the buzzing out of her blood and she returns to her motel to channel surf for the rest of the night.

* * *

Her uncle has a new nurse.

"Oh," she says, lips pursed, when she sights Laura. She's blond and hard-looking and she looks like she smells ruthless, although Laura can't pick things like that out of someone she's never met before. "Ms. Hale."

"Hi," Laura says, offering her hand. The nurse's pulse beats weakly against Laura's fingertips, a stark contrast to the firmness of her handshake. "Nice to meet you." Laura's cheerfulness is icy cold against her face, where her friendliness is fixed with iron bolts to keep it from slipping.

The nurse updates Laura on her uncle's condition—as if Laura's going to be surprised by the medical-babble code for 'no change'—and Laura nods in the right places and thanks her and then slips sideways through the door into Peter's room, where he's been wrapped in a terrycloth robe and dropped into a chair.

Laura has known since she was small that wishing her wolf away was futile and probably suicidal, and Peter is the evidence that she never needed to confirm this. With his wolf gone, his face blank and eyes guileless and wide, he's less than half of a person. Laura knows that Derek has too many issues with his wolf to count; part of her wants to show him Peter and remind him how _wrong _it is to be at odds with your wolf, but Derek isn't ready for Peter.

"Hey," says Laura steadily, sliding into the chair set across from Peter's. "It's Laura, Uncle Peter." His heart is steady and empty and long, a hairsbreadth off from the steady beeping of the monitor in the corner of his room. "It's, um, been a year. Like always."

Out in the hallway, the nurse finally stops lurking and returns, steps dragging and reluctant, to the nurse's station. "I guess you'd want to know how Derek's doing. I mentioned last time that I was here that he finished a year early and graduated. In the grand tradition of lit majors everywhere, he's taken a job completely unrelated to literature or the analysis of it. He's working at this garage in Brooklyn as an apprentice to the oldest Polish immigrant in the entirety of the state of New York. His advisor from NYU fell on her knees and begged him to apply to the graduate program this year. He's thinking about it."

Laura talks at Peter for two more hours, anecdotes about Derek's work in the garage ("He works so many shifts that I'm pretty sure Mr. Lukscai thinks he's secretly a homeless orphan, which is one out of two, I guess,") and a few filthy comments about his forays into Manhattan's clubbing scene ("It's like no one's ever seen a bisexual with an eight-pack before; he comes home and has to systematically delete like forty new numbers from his phone"), and then she excuses herself to pick at an unappetizing lunch in the hospital cafeteria.

She spends the second half of her trip reading Peter all of the headlines from the domestic and international sections of the _Beacon Hills Daily Mirror_ and then the entirety of the arts section, which is four pages long. For the last three hours, she continues her annual tradition of reading from a book that she stole from the top of the stack on Derek's bedside table. It changes every week; this time it's Aimee Bender, _The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake_.

Laura monitors Peter's heartbeat out of habit more than anything else as she reads. Unsurprisingly, considering that it's from Derek's collection and that the title features the word 'sadness' in conjunction with 'cake,' the book is a mess of feelings and Laura's voice begins to die halfway through, as the third hour draws to a close. Over what Laura personally feels are the worst parts, the ones that crush whole parts of her, Peter's heart runs smooth.

As she starts to leave, it jerks almost imperceptibly. The monitors show no sign of it, but Laura can hear it, clear and shocking, a marked stumble in an even, loping stride. "Uncle Peter?" she whispers, and she begins to sit back down.

Like brutally unsympathetic magic, the nurse appears in the doorway. "Visiting hours are over," she says waspishly.

"No, I know," Laura says automatically, mouth moving even as her hands reach out for Peter's, propped in his lap. "Give me a minute, please."

"If you want more time," the nurse replies, "you should consider coming more frequently."

"_Peter_," Laura whispers, but he gives no sign of having heard her; his heart and breathing are achingly steady. They're a pointed contrast to Laura's frantic pounding. "Can you hear me?" she adds a second later.

Peter does nothing.

"You need to leave," the nurse says. She sounds as if she's pretending to be sympathetic but can't quite manage the charade.

"I know," Laura says. "Shit—I mean, yeah." She drops her hands from where they are hovering in front of Peter, braced as though she's feeling for his aura or some other kind of metaphysical bullshit.

As if to ensure that Laura won't sneak back inside, the nurse tails Laura all the way to the exit. "Have a nice night," she says pointedly, and turns on a sharp heel to return inside. Laura wonders abstractly why she's still working, eight hours later, when it had been obvious from her clothes that she'd come out of the night shift that morning. Then she feels a small stab of guilt about conditions that make it so that her uncle's nurse has to pick up double shifts. A kid at home? A husband who's been laid off?

Laura and Derek seem incredibly lucky in comparison, if you forget that they got their ridiculously Bruce Waynian amount of money because everyone in their family was murdered by Derek's first serious girlfriend.

At five in the evening, Beacon Hills' shoddy nightlife is just coming into its own. There are two new restaurants since the last time Laura was in town, both on the main street, and she debates between them before deciding, like she does every time she's in town, that the emotional wreckage is not worth the trade-off of good food; she picks up Taco Bell on her way to the Preserve.

Laura eats the Taco Bell on the lawn outside of the house, facing into the forest, pretending that she can't map a happy family memory onto every inch of overgrown lawn, like she can't smell the brokenness of the house under the acrid sharpness of her tacos. The trick takes most of Laura's considerable powers of self-deceit and then she can't do it any more; she looks.

The top floor, where Natalie and Erin had shared a room, is gone completely. More ceiling tiles have fallen into the kitchen since the last time Laura was at the house, a year ago. She can count the number of beams that have shifted, the splinters that have disintegrated, and the animals that have moved in.

"Hi," Laura finally says. She can hear where a family of voles has built a burrow underneath the driveway; they sound happy for voles, nested down in grasses. If she listens, silent and frozen in place, she can hear the squirrels running up trees and owls shaking out their wings and weasels sneaking through the undergrowth.

The house is a black hole; nothing comes from inside it, even though Laura knows that an extensive mouse family has colonized it. It even seems to suck in the light from the fading sun and reflect nothing in return. She imagines it does something poetic and picturesque like that to her, but she's locked away the part of her that the house can hurt, and now it's just a wreck of a piece of property. She's fairly certain that she and Derek are in violation of about three kazillion zoning laws by keeping it standing.

"I miss you," Laura says, and immediately feels like an idiot. The words are dwarfed by the noise of the forest, the persistent buzzing of life that comes from having millions of creatures crawling over one another inside the Preserve. Surrounded by so many reminders of goddamn _Lion King _circle of life bullshit, she feels awkward and out of place and mostly like a heroine in a shitty independent drama. If this were a movie, Laura could guarantee that Derek would be watching with his _critically engaged _eyebrows locked low over his eyes, taking in every film school nuance of the scene.

"_Shit_," Laura mumbles under her breath.

It's still true, of course. She misses them, beyond the placating bullshit of a Hallmark card's worth of sentiment: Laura _aches _for her family, her heart _burns_ in her chest and the ash _suffocates _her lungs. Maybe this is how humans feel, after they get the bite: a large chunk of Laura has vanished, and in its place is a sharp, clawing agony.

"This," Laura says to no one, "is why I rarely visit _this fucking house_. I'm turning into Derek. Fuck."

The moment that Laura realizes this scene can be reasonable construed as her talking to the Camaro, she gives up trying to heal herself through forced witnessing of her childhood home crumble before her eyes. She folds the collar of her jacket up so that it rests against the back of her neck and then she stuffs her hands into the pockets and sets off into the woods. She could shift and do this faster as a wolf, but she enjoys the crunch of the leaves under her hiking boots; she likes kicking the dirt and watching it fall with human eyes.

Her territory ends three miles south of the house, where the tree line falls away from the river. Laura presses her back against three of the largest trees and sits for a few minutes, letting her scent soak into the wood. She could pee on them, which is what her dad had done, but Laura's human is at the forefront, enthralled by the pretty picture that the moon makes as it pushes above the trees and catches on the river, and Laura's human doesn't pee on trees.

Absently watching the play of the light, Laura plucks her hair out of its braid and then rubs her head against the tree, letting the bark catch on her hair and pull some of it out. She thinks about combing the bits of tree out after she's finished, but she's just going to have to repeat the process in two miles when she reaches the fringe of Hale land towards Susanville and it's not like there's anyone likely to go Clinton Kelly on her about her style choices.

Because she's in a _What Not to Wear_ frame of reference, it takes Laura a few seconds to peel herself out when she sees the flash of blue-grey out of the corner of her eye. The scent hits her seconds later; he's downwind, clever of him, and Laura's first, incredibly illogical thought is, _Fuck, of all the people who could give me shit about the goddamn hair_.

"Holy _fuck_," is the first thing she says, as Peter spins and launches towards her, fangs distended from his jaw, face long and narrow like something out of a Tim Burton film. He's incredibly fast, before even taking into account the six years he's spent as a vegetable in Beacon Hills Memorial, and the Alpha senses take over without any conscious input from Laura's reflexes. One second, Laura is facing down her uncle, his fingers distended into angry claws, and the next she's on top of him, knee in his lower back, claws gripped around his throat as she arches his back and forces him into the curve.

"Hello, Laura," Peter says, as if Laura has come by the house in Lookingglass for tea.

"What the _fuck_," Laura spits out in a half-growl, tightening her fingers around his throat. She leans over and presses her nose into the angled curve of his jaw, directly behind his ear. He smells like hospitals and death and slick, new skin but his wolf is still _wrong_. "Peter?"

"I would think that was obvious," Peter observes, his heart a metronome under Laura's fingertips.

"Obvious, he says," Laura says, the lightness of impending hysteria battling against the lower, threatening chords of her wolf's voice. "Yes, obvious. My comatose uncle wandering around the woods, _obvious_."

"Don't be hysterical," Peter says sharply, and his voice is so _familiar_, the whip-like strength of it, against the unfamiliar backdrop of his new wolf.

"Why are you different," Laura asks in a flat voice. There's this conflicted buzzing under her main thought process, a difficult-to-ignore _Peter woke up why did he wake up_. She wants to think _we're three now_ but Peter still isn't pack.

"You're a smart girl, Laura," Peter says, speaking calmly into the top layer of dead leaves. "What do you smell?"

He says this in the intense way he'd always asked questions, during the afternoons that he came over to speak with her father and then ended up with Laura and Natalie and Erin in the living room, commandeering their scent memory games and teaching them how to disguise their mark from other wolves.

The old need to be right and to please, a need that Laura hasn't felt since she sat numbly on the hood of her mother's car with Derek pressed shaking into her side as Sheriff Wallace and the rest of the Beacon County police department combed over the smoldering wreck of her childhood, tells Laura to offer her answer slowly, to make sure that she's saying what he wants.

And then Laura realizes, _fuck_ what he wants, she's his goddamn Alpha. "You're not pack anymore," Laura says, sounding more confident than she really feels. "I heard your heart stop, the night of the fire. A wolf's heart never stops." It's like Laura's thesis advisor is urging her on to the natural conclusion. _What do we take away from all of this_? "Ergo. New wolf."

"Brava," Peter says quietly, with palpable good grace and his odd, biting humor.

"Why the healing delay?" Laura asks. "Oh god, scratch that, why _everything_?" She presses more of her weight onto her knee, fighting down the urge to let him go.

"Am I going to be allowed to answer without a mouthful of dead leaves?" Peter asks politely.

"_No_," Laura growls, "because you just _attacked me_."

"I'm still unfamiliar with this new consciousness, Laura," Peter explains steadily. "I didn't know who you were."

His heartbeat doesn't tag it as a lie; Laura's native paranoia battles the part of her that is shrieking _HE'S AWAKE_ and the little girl that wants Uncle Peter to take over control of this mess of a situation and figure out a solution. Next year, the seven-year grace period will be up and the Hale territory will be threatened unless Laura can rebuild a pack; Derek is still too broken to even really think about Beacon Hills, let alone coming back; Laura still dreams about Chris some times, and she wakes up slick and furious and helpless in the face of his scent sinking into her skin.

Slowly, for a wolf, Laura rises to her feet and lets Peter stand. "So?" she demands aggressively, keeping her knees loose enough that—well, just in case.

Peter shrugs, elegant and slow, and adjusts the blue terrycloth hospital robe at his wrists. Laura hasn't spent enough time with him since the fire to allow the burns to become familiar; they stand out, like streaks of milk along the side of his face. She thinks of the house in Lookingglass and Miles' toys scattered on the floor, Joanna's handwriting on the calendar taped to their fridge.

"Things aren't right," Peter finally says, his posture loose and casual. Nothing about him indicates that anything is amiss, but there's an old tilt to his head that sends short, shivery pulses down Laura's back. Her wolf whines somewhere deep in her throat. "It hasn't escaped my notice that you've left a lot of loose ends walking around on borrowed time, Laura."

"Don't be cliché, Peter," Laura snips.

"Don't be _lazy_," Peter admonishes right back; he's better at it. "Emotional vulnerability is all well and good in a girl with your classical bone structure, but you're only supposed to _seem_ weak."

Laura rocks back on her heels and huffs, offended. "Right, because the guy who spent the last six years in a coma is clearly qualified to discuss the decisions his Alpha made while he was a vegetable."

"You're not my Alpha," Peter points out, and the silky quality of his voice has her wolf thinking, _Fuck_.

"Yes, semantics are clearly important right now," Laura says dismissively. She can feel herself scrambling to return them to some kind of equilibrium. Peter's presence is pulling out parts of her that haven't seen the sun in years; she doesn't even know _what_ she wants, just that there's a sticky ache in her chest and the back of her eyes and the base of her nose. "But if it's that much of a concern for you, we can do it now." She lets her eyes fill with bloody color. "The full moon is a week and a half away; plenty strong."

Peter frowns and then sighs, theatrically, and tosses his head. "Let's focus on the important matters at hand. The Argent girl, for example, and her merry band of helpers."

Laura laughs helplessly; it's not a pleasant sound. "Kate isn't important, Peter. _Derek_ is important. Pack is important."

"What pack?" Peter asks with a derisive eyebrow lift. "You haven't been biting anyone, have you?"

It's always been amazing to Laura how quickly Peter is able to get under someone's skin. He basically exists to define the term _little shit_. "No," she says, remarkably steady considering that her wolf wants to pin Peter to the ground again. "It's just Derek and I." Saying 'just' feels like a betrayal of how hard Laura has worked to keep herself and Derek alive.

Peter tsks. "You weren't prepared to be Alpha."

"No _shit_," Laura snarls. "I thought it was going to be Natalie or Erin after Dad, or maybe Michael. No one ever thought I would be Alpha. But I am your fucking Alpha and my only goal is to keep my brother and my pack alive."

"Oh yes," Peter agrees, "his trauma really must be something to behold. All of that guilt churning his insides." Queerly focused on Laura—on her neck—he asks, "Does he have dreams, Laura? About us inside of the house with his lady friend laughing herself sick outside?"

Laura's tongue feels swollen against the roof of her mouth. "I don't know," she admits after a long pause. She doesn't dream at all; she's never thought to ask Derek about it.

"I would," Peter says musingly. "They would haunt me."

To Laura's nose, Peter smells overwhelmingly like the hospital and his strange blond nurse. It's a peculiarly herbaceous scent; Laura's nose wrinkles as he shifts from one foot to the other and she's hit with a wave of it. "As wonderful as it is to have your highly qualified opinion of Derek's mental status," Laura says, relishing in the bitchiness, "I want to return your attention to the pertinent question on the table of _why_?"

Peter tilts his head to the left. "Laura, dear," he says. "That's far more complex than you would think."

Laura spreads her hands to show that they're surrounded by hundreds of acres of federally protected forest. "It's not like we don't have time, Uncle Peter," she points out.

"Well, _you_ might," Peter says. "But I'm on a bit of a tight schedule."

* * *

Peter presses his fingers to her forehead, gently pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. "I'm sorry," he says.

"Fuck you," Laura gasps. The words rattle wetly through her chest. "Seriously, _fuck you_. I hope Derek rips your spine out." She lacks the strength to make the words any stronger than a forceful whisper. Her healing factor is working steadily, sluggishly plugging along, but Laura already smells death on herself in thick, cloying waves.

"I imagine he will," Peter admits.

There are a lot of things Laura wants to say: pithy things about Peter being as crazy as a box of frogs and sentimental things about her dead family and sad things about Derek, who really will be alone and have a legitimate reason to brood and there won't be anyone to tease him out of his moods—and other, unexpected feelings, ones about Chris Argent that aren't directly related to homicide or sex—but death doesn't exactly pride itself on waiting around for you to finish your shit.

"F-fuck," Laura wheezes on an inhale, desperately praying, _I hope Derek finds the key to the storage container in Eureka_, and then the last of the flat, tar scent of death rolls over her head;

and that's it.


End file.
